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The BLOOMSBURY
Companion to Kant

Edited by

Gary Banham(†)
Dennis Schulting
and Nigel Hems

L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY

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First published as The Continuum Companion to Kant 2012

© Gary Banham, Dennis Schulting, Nigel Hems and Contributors 2012, 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Continuum companion to Kant
The Bloomsbury companion to Kant / edited by Gary Banham,
Dennis Schulting and Nigel Hems.—Second edition.
pages cm
“First published as The Continuum Companion to Kant, 2012.”
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-4725-8678-0 (paperback)
1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. I. Gary Banham, 1965–2013– editor.
II. Dennis Schulting, 1969–, editor. III. Nigel Hems, 1966–, editor. IV. Title.
B2798.C753  2015
193—dc23
2014033851

Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

Printed and bound in Great Britain
 Contents

Preface ix
Preface to the Second Edition xi
List of Abbreviations of Kant’s Works xiii
List of Contributors xvii

INTRODUCTION 1

PART I:  KEY WRITINGS

1. Key Works 11
The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of
the Existence of God 11
The ‘Inaugural Dissertation’ 13
Critique of Pure Reason 16
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Will Be Able to Come
Forward as Science 32
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals 34
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science 40
Critique of Practical Reason 45
Critique of Judgment 50
Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason 60
Toward Perpetual Peace 66
Metaphysics of Morals 70

PART II: KANT’S CONTEXTS

2. PHILOSOPHICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT 85
Academy prize essay 85
Aristotelianism 86
J. A. Eberhard 88
Empiricism 90
Frederick the Great 91
French Revolution 93
Garve-Feder review 94
Contents

J. G. Herder 96
Francis Hutcheson 98
Königsberg 99
J. H. Lambert 101
Moses Mendelssohn 102
Physical influx 105
Pietism 106
Prussia 108
School Philosophy 110
Adam Smith 112
Baruch de Spinoza/Spinozism 114
3. SOURCES AND INFLUENCES 121
Aristotle 121
Francis Bacon 124
A. G. Baumgarten 126
Cicero 128
C. A. Crusius 129
René Descartes 130
Epicurus and Epicureanism 133
Leonhard Euler 135
Marcus Herz 136
David Hume 137
G. W. Leibniz 139
John Locke 141
G. F. Meier 142
Isaac Newton 144
Plato 145
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 147
Emanuel Swedenborg 151
J. N. Tetens 154
Christian Wolff 156

PART III: KEY THEMES AND TOPICS

4. KEY THEMES AND TOPICS 165
Aesthetic Judgment / Amphiboly / Analogy / Analogies of Experience /
Analysis / Anthropology / Anticipations of Perception / Antinomies / Appearance
/ Apperception (Self-Consciousness) / A Priori, A Posteriori / Art (Genius) /
Axioms of Intuition / Categorical Imperative (Moral Law) / Cosmopolitan(ism)
/ Critique / Deduction (Categories) / Dialectic / Duty, Duties / Enlightenment
/ Enthusiasm / Experience (Sensibility) / Form, Formal / Freedom / Geometry
/ Idea, Ideas / Identity / Imagination / Inner and Outer Sense / Interest /
Intuition / Judgment (Understanding) / Kingdom of Ends / Knowledge / Laws
(of Nature), Lawfulness / Logic (Concept, Thought, Syllogism) / Mathematics
/ Metaphysics / Method / Morality / Natural Science / Necessity / Object,
Objectivity / Paralogisms / Postulates of Empirical Thinking / Principle of

vi
 Contents

(Non-)Contradiction / Principle of Sufficient Reason / Proof / Proofs of

the Existence of God / Psychology / Pure / Radical Evil / Reality (Objective
Reality) / Reason / Refutation of Idealism / Regulative Principles / Religion
(Highest Good) / Representation / Right / Schematism / Spontaneity / Sublime /
Synthesis (Synthetic A Priori) / System / Teleology (Purposiveness, End) / Thing
in Itself / Transcendental / Transcendental Aesthetic / Transcendental Ideal /
Transcendental Idealism / Truth / Virtue, Virtues / Will (Choice)

PART IV: RECEPTION AND INFLUENCE

5. RECEPTION AND INFLUENCE 293
Until 1781: Responses to Kant’s ‘Inaugural Dissertation’ (1770) 293
First Reactions to the Critique of Pure Reason: the 1780s and Later 297
Kantianism in the 1790s: From Reinhold to Hegel 305
Hegel’s Appropriation of Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy in the Jena Period 310
Schopenhauer’s Reception of Kant 313
‘Back to Kant’: Neo-Kantianism 318
Heidegger’s Ontological Reading of Kant 324
Analytical Kantianism 329
Analytic Approaches to Kant’s Ethics 333
Kantian Normativity in Rawls, Korsgaard and Continental Practical Philosophy 337

PART V: BIBLIOGRAPHY
6. KANT BIBLIOGRAPHY 351

Index 421

vii
 Preface

There are few philosophers whose influence is more widely felt across the range of the subject
in the contemporary world than is the case with Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Despite the
breadth of Kant’s influence on contemporary philosophy, it can be extremely difficult to get
a grip on the nature of Kant’s own work. One of the central reasons why this can be so dif-
ficult is precisely because of the range of Kant’s own philosophical contributions. To make a
major impact on the understanding of metaphysics would be sufficient reason for a thinker to
be regarded as a ‘major’ philosopher. But Kant’s ethics are surely as central to debates in con-
temporary moral philosophy as the Critique of Pure Reason is in contemporary metaphysics
and epistemology. Nor does Kant’s importance end there since, as is widely recognized, the
Critique of Judgment is foundational for the modern discipline of aesthetics (in addition to
raising questions about teleology that have, if anything, gained in resonance in recent years).
Finally, the comprehension of the status of scientific laws and the way science itself is philo-
sophically understood are topics that often lead thinkers to read or re-read The Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science. When these points are put together, it becomes evident that
Kant ‘ s influence is not only broad in range on contemporary philosophy but comprehending
the nature of this influence is itself something that requires extended reflection and for such
reflection to be effective, there is a need for guidebooks that clearly map all the central ele-
ments of Kant’s philosophy.
It is the point of this Companion to fill this need, something that many guides to Kant’s
philosophy only partially do. In order to meet this requirement we have assembled a wid-
eranging, international team that can together help general readers to find their way around
both the specific parts of Kant’s philosophy and the inter-relations between them. Whilst
the work of each of us as editors of this volume has been considerable, the effect of the
Companion would be without doubt that much less were it not for the many contributions
we solicited and received. For the work provided here, we would like to thank Lucy Allais,
Tom Bailey, Steven M. Bayne, Karin de Boer, Kees Jan Brons, John Callanan, Luigi Caranti,
Howard Caygill, Martin Davies, Katerina Deligiorgi, Corey Dyck, Wolfgang Ertl, Richard
Fincham, Samuel Fleischacker, Brett Fulkerson-Smith, Ido Geiger, Gregory Johnson, Johan de
Jong, Christian Krijnen, Beth Lord, Michela Massimi, Giuseppe Motta, Ernst-Otto Onnasch,
Christian Onof, Marcel Quarfood, Aviv Reiter, Yaron Senderowicz, Marco Sgarbi, Scott
Stapleford, Rudi te Velde, Jacco Verburgt, Falk Wunderlich and Job Zinkstok.
Preface

Dennis Schulting also wants to thank both Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never and
Mark McGuire for delivering the viscerally stirring goods in the form of their respective
‘­kosmische’ music albums Rifts and A Young Person’s Guide to Mark McGuire, which along-
side copious amounts of Bruckner he played on repeat whilst copy-editing this Companion.

The Editors
Gary Banham
Dennis Schulting
Nigel Hems

x
 Preface to the second edition

For this paperback edition, revisions were carried out and several more entries were added.
In the Section ‘Philosophical and Historical Context’ there is now also an essay on Herder,
an important erstwhile student and later tough opponent of Kant, and an article on School
Philosophy, which provides more insight into the philosophical background of Kant’s
thought. The lemma on Rousseau, in the Section ‘Sources and Influences’, has been rewritten
and expanded. In the Section ‘Key Themes and Topics’, four more entries on ‘Appearance’,
‘Intuition’, ‘Postulates of Empirical Thought in General’, and ‘Thing in Itself’ have been
added, which, although dealt with in other entries in the first edition, merited a separate treat-
ment. In the Section ‘Reception and Influence’, an essay on Schopenhauer’s interpretation of
Kant adds to the topic of the reception of Kant’s work in post-Kantian philosophy. Lastly, the
bibliography has been improved and updated with the newest literature. I am very pleased
that Robert Clewis, Wolfgang Ertl, Christian Onof, Sandra Shapshay and John Zammito have
contributed to the new edition of the Companion.
Sadly, slightly over a year after the publication of the first edition of the Companion, Gary
Banham, the originator of the project for this Companion, died suddenly when on holiday in
Rome in March 2013. This expanded edition is dedicated to his memory. The Section ‘Key
Works’, which was singlehandedly written by Gary, is left largely unchanged.
The Editor
Dennis Schulting

xi
 List of Abbreviations
OF KANT’S WORKS

Throughout the Companion the following abbreviations are used followed by the page
­numbers only of the respective volume in the Academic edition of Kant’s work (AA) (Kant’s
gesammelte Schriften, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900–). So, for example, a reference to the Critique
of Judgment, say, is provided thus: CJ 284. The Reflexionen are cited by means of the abbre-
viation Refl followed by the Akademie Adickes number.
For the first Critique the standard way of referring to the original pagination is adhered to,
by means of the A/B citation, where A stands for the first or so-called A-edition, published in
1781, and B for the second or B-edition, published in 1787.
Quotations are in almost all cases from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel
Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992ff.), which contains English translations
of almost all of Kant’s published works and many of the lectures, correspondence, unpub-
lished manuscripts and so-called Reflections.
Where available, for each specific work in translation the volume number of The Cambridge
Edition (CE) is given after the AA volume number according to the following list of volumes
already published:

1. Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770

2. Critique of Pure Reason
3. Theoretical Philosophy after 1781
4. Practical Philosophy
5. Critique of the Power of Judgment
6. Religion and Rational Theology
7. Anthropology, History, and Education
9. Lectures on Logic
10. Lectures on Metaphysics
11. Lectures on Ethics
12. Opus postumum
13. Notes and Fragments
14. Correspondence
15. Natural Science
16. Lectures on Anthropology

xiii
List of Abbreviations OF KANT’S WORKS

A = Critique of Pure Reason, A-edition (CE 2)

AL = M. Immanuel Kant’s Announcement of the programme of his Lectures for the
winter semester 1765–1766 (AA 2; CE 1)
Anthr = Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view (AA 7; CE 7)
B = Critique of Pure Reason, B-edition (CE 2)
CBH = Conjectural Beginning of human History (AA 8; CE 7)
CF = Conflict of the Faculties (AA 7; CE 6)
CJ = Critique of (the power of) Judgment (AA 5; CE 5)
Corr-I/II/III = Correspondence (AA 10-13; CE 14)
CPrR = Critique of Practical Reason (AA 5; CE 4)
Disc = On a Discovery whereby any new critique of pure reason is to be made super-
fluous by an older one (AA 8; CE 3)
DR = Of the Different Races of human beings (AA 2; CE 7)
DRTBaum = Danziger Rationaltheologie Baumbach (Mrongovius) (AA 28)
DS = Concerning the ultimate ground of the differentiation of Directions in Space
(AA 2; CE 1)
DSS = Dreams of a Spirit-Seer elucidated by dreams of metaphysics (AA 2, CE 1)
E = What is Enlightenment? (AA 8; CE 4)
EAR = Untersuchung der Frage ob die Erde in ihrer Umdrehung um die Achse
[. . .] einige Veränderung seit den ersten Zeiten ihres Ursprungs erlitten habe
[Earth’s Axial Rotation] (AA 1; CE 15)
EMH = Essay on the Maladies of the Head (AA 2; CE 7)
End = The End of all things (AA 8; CE 6)
EPh = Essays regarding the Philantropinum (AA 2; CE 7)
F = Succinct exposition of some meditations on Fire (AA 1; CE 15)
FI = Critique of (the power of) judgment, First Introduction (AA 20; CE 5)
FS = The False Subtlety of the four syllogistic figures (AA 2; CE 1)
G = Groundwork of metaphysics of morals (AA 4; CE 4)
HR = Determination of the concept of a Human Race (AA 8; CE 7)
ID = On the form and principles of the sensible and the intelligible world [Inaugural
Dissertation] (AA 2; CE 1)
Inq = Inquiry concerning the distinctness of the principles of natural theology and
morality (AA 2; CE 1)
JL = Jäsche Logic (AA 9; CE 9)
LA = Lectures on Anthropology (AA 25; CE 16)
LE = Lectures on Ethics (AA 27; CE 11)
LE-M = Lectures on Ethics; Mrongovius (AA 29; CE 11)
LenFr = Leningrad Fragment I ‘Vom inneren Sinn’, in R. Brandt & W. Stark (eds),
Kant-Forschungen, Bd. 1 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1987), pp. 18–27 (CE 13)
LF = Thoughts on the true estimation of Living Forces (AA 1; CE 15)
LL = Lectures on Logic (AA 24; CE 9)
LM = Lectures on Metaphysics (AA 28; CE 10)
LM-M/V = Lectures on Metaphysics; Mrongovius/Vigilantius (AA 29; CE 10)

xiv
 List of Abbreviations OF KANT’S WORKS

LP = Lectures on Pedagogy (AA 9; CE 7)

LPöl = Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion; Pölitz (AA 28; CE 6)
MFNS = Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (AA 4; CE 3)
MM = Metaphysics of Morals (AA 6; CE 4)
MR = Neuer Lehrbegriff der Bewegung und Ruhe [Motion and Rest] (AA 2; CE 15)
MT = On the Miscarriage of philosophical trials in Theodicy (AA 8; CE 6)
ND = A new elucidation of the first principles of metaphysical cognition [Nova
Dilucidatio] (AA 1; CE 1)
NH = Universal Natural History and theory of the heavens (AA 1; CE 15)
NM = Attempt to introduce the concept of Negative Magnitudes into philosophy
(AA 2; CE 1)
Obs = Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime (AA 2; CE 7)
Obs-R = Remarks on Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime
(AA 20; CE 13)
OP-I/II = Opus postumum (AA 21-22; CE 12)
OPD = The Only Possible argument in support of a Demonstration of the existence
of God (AA 2; CE 1)
Opt = An attempt at some reflections on Optimism (AA 2; CE 1)
OT = What does it mean to Orient oneself in Thinking? (AA 8; CE 6)
P = Prolegomena to any future metaphysics (AA 4; CE 3)
PE = What real progress has metaphysics made in Germany since the time of
Leibniz and Wolff? [Prize Essay] (AA 20; CE 3)
PG = Physical Geography (AA 9; CE 15)
PhM = Physical Monadology (AA 1; CE 1)
PP = Toward Perpetual Peace (AA 8; CE 4)
PTS = On a recently Prominent Tone of Superiority in philosophy (AA 8; CE 3)
R = Religion within the boundaries of mere reason (AA 6; CE 6)
Refl = Reflections (Reflexionen) (AA 14-19; CE 13)
SRL = On a Supposed Right to Lie from philanthropy (AA 8; CE 4)
TP = On the common saying: that may be correct in Theory, but it is of no use in
Practice (AA 8; CE 4)
UH = Idea for a Universal History with a cosmopolitan aim (AA 8; CE 7)
UTP = On the Use of Teleological Principles (AA 8; CE 7)

xv
 List of Contributors

Professor Dr Lucy Allais Dr Robert Clewis

University of California San Diego, Gwynedd-Mercy University
USA / Wits University, South Africa USA

Dr Tom Bailey Martin Davies

John Cabot University University of Leicester
Italy UK

Dr Gary Banham(†) Dr Katerina Deligiorgi

Manchester University of Sussex
UK UK

Dr Steven Bayne Dr Corey Dyck

Fairfield University University of Western Ontario
USA Canada

Professor Dr Karin de Boer Professor Dr Wolfgang Ertl

Leuven University Keio University
Belgium Japan

Dr Kees Jan Brons Dr Richard Fincham

University of Amsterdam The American University in Cairo
The Netherlands Egypt

Dr John Callanan Professor Dr Samuel Fleischacker

King’s College London University of Illinois at Chicago
UK USA

Dr Luigi Caranti Dr Brett Fulkerson-Smith

University of Catania Harper College
Italy USA

Professor Dr Howard Caygill Dr Ido Geiger

Kingston University Ben-Gurion University
UK Israel

xvii
List of Contributors

Dr Nigel Hems Dr Dennis Schulting

Manchester Metropolitan University Munich
UK Germany

Dr Gregory Johnson
Dr Yaron Senderowicz
San Francisco
Tel Aviv University
USA
Israel
Johan de Jong
University of Amsterdam Dr Marco Sgarbi
The Netherlands University of Venice
Italy
Dr Christian Krijnen
VU University Amsterdam
Dr Sandra Shapshay
The Netherlands
Indiana University
Dr Beth Lord USA
University of Aberdeen
UK Dr Scott Stapleford
St Thomas University
Dr Michela Massimi Canada
University of Edinburgh
UK Professor Dr Rudi te Velde
Dr Giuseppe Motta University of Amsterdam
University of Graz The Netherlands
Austria
Dr Jacco Verburgt
Dr Ernst-Otto Onnasch Amsterdam
University of Utrecht The Netherlands
The Netherlands
Dr Falk Wunderlich
Dr Christian Onof University of Mainz
Imperial College London Germany
UK

Dr Marcel Quarfood Professor Dr John Zammito

Stockholm University Rice University
Sweden USA

Aviv Reiter Dr Job Zinkstok

Tel Aviv University Amsterdam
Israel The Netherlands

xviii
 INTRODUCTION
In 1970, at the conclusion of his presiden-
tial address to the Eastern meeting of the
American Philosophical Association, Wilfrid
Sellars wrote that there was not an earlier
time at which Kant had been taken so seri-
ously as today, particularly in the English-
speaking world as ‘a whole new generation
of commentators is coming into existence’.1
Sellars’ words ring, if anything, even more
true today and, as always, there is ‘a whole
new generation of commentators’ who are
presenting new vantage-points upon the
work of Kant. As a result, one of the objec-
tives of this Companion is to help introduce
to a wider philosophical public some sense of
the debates and currents within contempo-
rary Kantian philosophy in addition to pro-
viding resources enabling an introduction to
the broad themes of Kant’s philosophy and
the reasons why it remains such a fertile area
for philosophical research.
Before setting out some reasons for view-
ing this companion as a useful addition to
the reference literature that exists on Kant,
it is first worth taking some time to mention
the important existent texts of similar type,
partly in order also to make clearer to the
general reader the geography of the work
that exists in connection with Kant and
how it intersects with broader philosophical
1
concerns. One of the ways in which Kant’s
philosophy has to be approached is clearly
in relation to the historical context of the
Enlightenment and eighteenth-century
Germany in particular. Foremost among the
responses to this kind of historical concern
with Kant’s philosophy is work of a bio-
graphical character.2 However, while a bio-
graphical focus gives important information
concerning the formation of Kant’s ideas and
helps us to comprehend something of the
way the Critical philosophy emerged, it is of
less help in comprehending the manner of the
reception of Kant’s philosophy and how that
reception may in turn have prompted Kant to
revise and rearticulate his philosophy.3 The
relationship between the context from which
Kant arose and the context of his reception
is one that raises a number of philosophical
and historiographical questions which have
received extensive treatment in recent years.4
There has been a noted turn toward such
historical studies of Kant, particularly in
relation to his reception of and relationship
to the subsequent movement of German
Idealism, in recent years.5 A number of
recent companions to Kant are also influ-
enced by this ‘historical turn’ including,
invariably, essay-length pieces that focus
on either Kant’s original context of writing,
Introduction
tracking his development, or, conversely, on
the reception of his work.6 However, the
essay-length pieces featured in these com-
panions are quite different from the kinds of
contributions that are featured in this com-
panion. What is standard in the current run
of companions to Kant is the provision of
largely single-author essay-length pieces that
provide overviews to the areas in question.
By contrast, this companion is intended to
be a genuine handbook, including sections
devoted to both the historical background
of Kant’s work and to the reception of it.
These sections are written by many hands
and are presented here as short guides to the
areas in question, often including reviews of
areas complete with bibliography for further
reading. Thus, by contrast to the model of
‘companions’ now current, this one is aimed
at providing information that provides an
easy guide to both areas and sub-areas and
presents a plurality of voices with regard to
the questions covered. The fact that such an
approach is possible within this handbook is
a tribute to the work previously done but it
also enables a divergence from that work by
providing shorter, more succinct entries that
cover more discrete topics.7
Philosophical work on Kant has tended,
for obvious reasons, to split between its
three clear poles. Some, that is, has focused
exclusively on Kant’s theoretical philosophy
and its relationship to the previous history
of metaphysics, other works just on Kant’s
practical philosophy and its relationship to
predominant schools of ethics and political
philosophy, while, finally, a third group has
focused more or less exclusively upon Kant’s
aesthetics.8 These distinct foci have provided
much work of value and stimulated a series
of important debates.
The key topics of Kant’s theoretical phi-
losophy include the status of the synthetic a
2
priori, the nature and extent of his reply to
Hume’s scepticism, particularly in relation to
causation, the justification of the categories,
the understanding of transcendental ideal-
ism and the problematic ‘defence’ of free will.
This list is one that arises purely from think-
ing through the topics of the Critique of Pure
Reason, undoubtedly the work of Kant’s that
has had widest philosophical influence despite
its evident difficulty. The Critique is generally
understood to have changed the landscape of
modern philosophy, as it helped both to bring
a certain style of philosophy to an end in
addition to promoting the formation of new
styles of philosophy. The importance of the
former has been widely recognized with the
conception of Kant as ‘all-destroying’ in rela-
tion to traditional arguments for the exist-
ence of God and, indeed, the general role of
philosophy that was promoted at least since
Descartes, challenged and overturned.9
However, this image of Kant as an ‘all-
destroyer’ is itself capable of promoting a
view of his achievement that makes it harder
to comprehend him as having contributed to
the reformation of metaphysics, rather than
to its destruction. Among earlier generations
of Kant interpreters, for example, a broadly
deflationary view of Kant’s own metaphysi-
cal views had the effect of popularising an
image of Kant as being a philosopher who
was ‘opposed’ to metaphysics.10 More recent
commentators have, in response, sought
to restore the notion that Kant is indeed a
contributor to metaphysics and not merely
a critic of it.11 This ‘turn’ in the interpreta-
tion of Kant’s theoretical philosophy has
been accompanied by a much greater degree
of attention to Kant’s lectures on metaphys-
ics and to the interplay between the Critique
and Kant’s subsequent works on theoretical
philosophy.12 I don’t mean to suggest here
that a new ‘consensus’ view has thereby

emerged in relation to Kant’s metaphysics as
it remains an area of lively contention. But
what such contention involves, increasingly,
is a sense that the resources of metaphysics
in Kant are broader than was previously sug-
gested and that techniques of research that
have had success in relation to other figures
in early modern philosophy also have perti-
nence with regard to Kant.
If the area of Kant’s theoretical philoso-
phy has been the site of much controversy
concerning the relation this philosophy has
to the general area of metaphysics, the inter-
pretation of his practical philosophy, by
contrast, has been determined largely by an
overly reductive response to his intervention
in this area. Until comparatively recently,
the response to Kant’s practical philosophy
was overwhelmingly oriented by a view of
it based on a reading of his initial Critical
work in the area, the Groundwork for the
Metaphysics of Morals. However, such a view
of Kant’s ethics has been strongly challenged
in recent years. On the one hand, the upsurge
of interest in Kantian ethics that flowed
from Rawlsian work in the area has given
rise to the general conception of ‘Kantian
constructivism’.13 This reading of Kant pro-
moted an understanding of the ‘categorical
imperative procedure’ that highlighted the
importance of Kant’s appeal to the univer-
sal law of nature and aimed to show that
consistency of willing is a more substantive
conception than some critics of Kant have
tended to think.
In contrast to the ‘constructivist’ reading
of Kant’s ethics, there has been a resurgence
of interest in the wider setting of Kant’s writ-
ings, going beyond the Groundwork and
looking in addition at Kant’s wider writings
on practical philosophy. This has included
assessing his work on religion, both Religion
within the Limits of Reason Alone and the
3
Introduction
Conflict of the Faculties.14 This general ten-
dency has, however, been a main focus in new
concentration on the work the Groundwork
was intended to prepare the way for: The
Metaphysics of Morals.15 In addition to pro-
viding such a broader vista, this concentra-
tion has suggested that the attempt to deny
Kant a ‘comprehensive’ conception in the
area of practical philosophy is doomed to
failure and that such a failure is likely to be a
good thing in promoting an integrated read-
ing of Kant’s practical philosophy. Part of the
point of such an integrated reading would
further be to suggest that the understand-
ing of the ‘unity of reason’ requires relating
Kant’s practical philosophy more carefully to
his theoretical philosophy.
If both the theoretical and practical phi-
losophy of Kant are areas in which there is
considerable debate concerning the nature
of his legacy, this is likewise true in response
to the work that has come to seem to some
the most important part of his Critical phi-
losophy, namely, the Critique of Judgment.
Concentration on this has traditionally been
concerned with the first half of the book, the
‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’, a concen-
tration that has, however, tended to have the
effect of ensuring that it has become obscure
to contemporary readers why it is that Kant
also treated the topic of teleology in the same
book. This has not been helped by treat-
ments of the Third Critique that downplay
the topic of ‘reflective judgment’.16 The effect
of such readings of the Third Critique has
been wide-ranging, not least in the areas of
art criticism and art theory.17 The arrival of
challenges to such a conception of the Third
Critique has taken a number of forms. One
element of the arrival of new readings of the
work has been the increased attention given
in recent years to Kant’s view of the sublime,
something long marginalized by works that
Introduction
concentrated largely on his account of the
beautiful.18 This shift in focus has helped to
complicate the understanding of Kant’s phil-
osophical aesthetics although the integration
of his treatment of aesthetics in the Third
Critique with that provided elsewhere in his
Critical philosophy is a broader challenge.19
A broad reading of the whole of the Third
Critique bringing out both the relationship
between the logic and the aesthetic of reflec-
tive judgment and the rationale for Kant’s
discussion of teleology has been a focus of the
most important recent works on the area.20
There has also been a resurgence of historical
work on the Third Critique that has argued
for revisionist conceptions of its composi-
tion21 and for revisions of understanding of
his view of teleology.22 As is the case with the
new work being undertaken in other areas
of Kantian philosophy, so also with the new
work on the Third Critique the result has
been both a challenge to the received image
of the work and a resulting greater complex-
ity in the idea of Kant’s contributions both
to the areas investigated in the work and his
relationship to the history of both aesthetics
and teleology.
Across the areas of Kantian philosophy,
there has thus arisen in recent years a series
of challenges to the received conceptions
both of the import of Kant’s own principles
and methodology and of the relationship
between Kant’s works and contemporary
philosophy. It was, for a time, easy to view
Kant as being a major figure in the history of
philosophy without necessarily assenting to
the idea that his work was of importance to
ongoing philosophical work. The challenge
to this complacent view has come about
through a combination of scholarly atten-
tion to the range of Kant’s works, something
that has been assisted by a range of trans-
lations of works into English that were not
4
previously available and the rise of an histor-
ical sense that was often lacking in previous
generations of Anglo-American philosophers.
Alongside this scholarly challenge has come
a philosophical one as the interplay between
philosophers in different countries has grown
wider and a result of this has been the under-
mining of the conception that there is only
one philosophical method that is respectable.
The rise of such philosophical pluralism has
led to the revival of Kantian studies as it has
promoted new insights into areas of Kant’s
works that were previously unexplored or
underexplored.23 This has included attention
being finally given both to Kant’s final torso
of a work, the Opus Postumum24 and to his
early, so-called, ‘pre-Critical’ works.25
Putting together the result of these chal-
lenges is to make clear the need for a survey
of Kant’s work in a form that is accessible
to the general philosophical public and yet
which includes a sense of the transition
through which the reception of this work is
undergoing. The ‘Key Works’ section of this
companion is intended to provide part of this
service, giving, as it does, an account of each
of the major works Kant wrote and render-
ing, in the process, a comprehensible and yet
succinct treatment of the major points of
these works. Alongside this treatment, the
‘Themes and Topics’ section is meant further
to orient the reader to the key areas in Kant’s
works. It is also important that a general bib-
liography be made available which enables
works on each of the major areas of Kant’s
philosophy to be brought together and the
companion concludes with this.
The importance of Kant’s philosophy for
contemporary philosophers does indeed, as
Wilfrid Sellars wrote 40 years ago, continue
to grow. It is the hope of the editors of this
companion that we have provided a map to
navigate the terrain of Kant’s philosophy,

including an account of the context of its
production, its reception, its themes and a
guide to its major works. The companion is
oriented to the needs of general philosophers
and aims to introduce them to the resources
that Kantians are aware of and think others
need to also be cognizant of. If it furthers
engagement with Kant’s philosophy by a
wider public it will have served its purpose
admirably. – GB
Notes
1
W. Sellars, ‘“. . .this I or he or it (the thing)
which thinks. . . .”’, in J. F. Sicha (ed.), Kant’s
Transcendental Metaphysics: Sellars’ Cassirer
Lecture Notes and Other Essays (Atascadero:
Ridgeview, 2002), p. 362.
2
Perhaps the most important recent work in
this vein is M. Kuehn, Kant: A Biography
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001). A more general attempt to relate
Kant to his German philosophical context
is provided in L. W. Beck, Early German
Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969),
which, despite its age, is still a vital guide to
the background of Kant’s work but which
is also well complemented by M. Kuehn,
Scottish Common Sense in Germany,
1768–1800: A Contribution to the History
of Critical Philosophy (Kingston/Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987) and
H. Caygill, The Art of Judgment (Oxford/
New York: Blackwell, 1989). For historical
background to Kant’s practical philosophy see
J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy:
A History of Modern Moral Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989) and J. B. Schneewind, Essays on the
History of Moral Philosophy (Oxford/New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
3
In fact, works that attempt to investigate this are
rarer than general surveys of the type referred to
in the previous note. For a collection of impor-
tant texts of early respondents to Kant see
B. Sassen (ed.), Kant’s Early Critics: The
Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical
5
Introduction
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000). For more general attempts to situ-
ate Kant in relation to his contemporaries see
K. Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy:
Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000) and F. C. Beiser, German Idealism:
The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781–1801
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002).
4
Scholarship in Germany, in particular, has
focused on some of these questions, not least
in the work of Manfred Frank and Dieter
Henrich although only a small portion of their
work is as yet available in English translation.
See D. Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel:
Lectures on German Idealism, trans. D. S.
Pacini, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2003), D. Henrich, The Unity of Reason:
Essays on Kant’s Philosophy, trans. R. L.
Velkley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1994), and M. Frank, The Philosophical
Foundations of Early German Romanticism,
trans. Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert (Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 2004). There have been some
important compilations of translations relating
to Kant’s reception such as the aforemen-
tioned work by Sassen and G. Di Giovanni,
H. S. Harris (eds), Between Kant and Hegel:
Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian
Idealism (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett
Publishing Company, 1985). See also the impor-
tant translation by K. Ameriks of Reinhold’s
Letters on the Kantian Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
5
This has taken a number of forms from
works such as B. Lord, Kant and Spinozism:
Transcendental Idealism and Immanence From
Jacobi to Deleuze (Basingstoke/New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and P. Franks,
All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental
Arguments, and Skepticism in German
Idealism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2005) to K. Ameriks (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to German Idealism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001) and F. C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason:
German Philosophy From Kant to Fichte
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1987). Focus on the relationship between Kant
and early modern philosophy is something that
is less developed though it was part of Wilfrid
Introduction
Sellars’ interest as is evidenced in P. Amaral
(ed.), Kant and Pre-Kantian Themes: Lectures
by Wilfrid Sellars (Atascadero: Ridgeview,
2002) and see for a sustained attempt to con-
nect scholarship on Kant with that on early
modern philosophy, B. Longuenesse, D. Garber
(eds), Kant and the Early Moderns (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2008).
6
For some companions that feature such
essays see G. Bird (ed.), A Companion to
Kant (Oxford/New York: Wiley-Blackwell,
2006, 2010), P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
and P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion
to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010).
7
It should be added that it is also the case that
understanding the context from which Kant
emerged has become easier of late for the
English language reader due to the provision of
many more of the materials in question in trans-
lation. For a selection of texts that influenced
Kant and that have previously not been available
to the English-language student of Kant, see
E. Watkins (ed.), Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:
Background Source Materials (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
8
There are also some, albeit fewer, works that
focus predominately on Kant’s relationship
to natural science and some that are based
mainly on accounting for his understanding
of teleology. For an example of the former see
M. Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1992) while, on the latter, J. D. McFarland,
Kant’s Concept of Teleology (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1970) and
P. McLaughlin, Kant’s Critique of Teleology
in Biological Explanation: Antinomy and
Teleology (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press,
1990) are both important.
9
Despite the wide recognition of this role of
Kant’s Critical philosophy there is, nonetheless,
a marked paucity of English-language work on
the Transcendental Dialectic, the side of Kant’s
Critique that was devoted above all to this
task. Evidence of this is that J. Bennett, Kant’s
Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1974) is still one of the few major works
exclusively devoted to the subject matter of
Kant’s dialectic. But see also more recently
6
M. Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental
Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001).
10
G. Bird, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge (London/
New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1962) and H. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental
Idealism. An Interpretation and Defense (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), and its
second enlarged edition from 2004, are the key
works that present this deflationary approach
to transcendental idealism, an approach that
was absorbed in the wider culture as indicating
a Kantian ‘opposition’ to metaphysics, though
the works of Bird and Allison themselves are
not consonant with such a view.
11
Among such newly metaphysical readings
of Kant can be listed the works of Ameriks,
Kant’s Theory of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1982), R. Langton, Kantian Humility
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) and
R. Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). See, for
a more general overview of work on Kant’s
idealism in relation to even more recent
scholarship, D. Schulting, J. Verburgt (eds),
Kant’s Idealism: New Interpretations of a
Controversial Doctrine (Dordrecht: Springer
Science, 2011).
12
Translation of Kant’s lectures on metaphysics
is now part of the Cambridge edition of Kant’s
works as have been such later works as his
final piece on ‘progress’ in metaphysics.
13
This notion found its most influential ­advocacy
in J. Rawls, ‘Kantian constructivism in moral
theory’, in The Journal of Philosophy, LXXVII,
9 (1980): pp. 515–573, though the view
itself was later rejected by Rawls in favour
of a ‘purely political’ constructivism. For an
overview of the relationship between Rawls’
understanding of it and Kant’s own ‘construc-
tivism’ see O. O’Neill, ‘Constructivism in Rawls
and Kant’, in S. Freeman (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Rawls (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), pp. 347–367. For a
forceful rejection of ‘constructivist’ readings of
Kant see A. Hills, ‘Kantian value realism’, in
Ratio 21, 2 (2008): 182–200.
14
Among recent work focusing on this area
see J. DiCenso, Kant, Religion and Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), C. L. Firestone, N. Jacobs (eds),
In Defense of Kant’s Religion (Bloomington,

IN: Indiana University Press, 2009) and A. W.
Moore, Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty:
Themes and Variations in Kant’s Moral and
Religious Philosophy (London/New York:
Routledge, 2003).
15
For a selection of work on such topics, see
M. Timmons (ed.), Kant’s Metaphysics of
Morals: Interpretative Essays (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002) and L. Denis (ed.),
Kant’s ‘Metaphysics of Morals’: A Critical
Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010). For work specifically on the
Doctrine of Right, see A. Ripstein, Force and
Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009), B. Sharon Byrd, J. Hruschka,
Kant’s Doctrine of Right: A Commentary
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), and O. Höffe, K. Ameriks (eds), Kant’s
Moral and Legal Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
16
For classic examples of work on the Third
Critique that focuses exclusively on the treat-
ment of aesthetics and further cannot clearly
accommodate the emphasis on reflective
judgment, see H. Allison, Kant’s Theory of
Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001) and P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims
of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979) though Guyer revises the response
to reflective judgment in his Kant’s System of
Nature and Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
17
For a critical response to the traditional view
of Kantian aesthetics promoted within art
theory, see T. De Duve, Kant After Duchamp
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
18
A key work in this shift is certainly the
commentary of J.-F. Lyotard, Lessons on the
Analytic of the Sublime (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1994).
19
It is attempted in G. Banham, Kant and the
Ends of Aesthetics (London: Macmillan, 2000).
20
This includes A. Nuzzo, Kant and the Unity
of Reason (West Lafayette: Purdue University
Press, 2005) and R. Zuckert, Kant on
Beauty and Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007).
21
J. H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique
of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992).
7
Introduction
22
Two types of response to Kantian teleology in
recent philosophy are provided by Lord, Kant
and Spinozism and by A. Toscano, The Theatre
of Production: Philosophy and Individuation
between Kant and Deleuze (Basingstoke/New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
23
One of many examples of this has been
the way that Kant’s anthropology has
become a respectable object of study that
is now often mined for insights of a wider
sort than were previously thought avail-
able given its ‘pragmatic’ orientation. For
examples of how different types of phi-
losophers have begun to utilize this resource
see M. Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s
Anthropology (Cambridge, MA/London:
Semiotext(e), 2008), P. R. Frierson, Freedom
and Anthropology in Kant’s Moral Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003) and J. H. Zammito, Kant, Herder
and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002). Also
H. Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology.
Its Origin, Meaning, and Critical Significance
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006); and the
publication of the Anthropology, History and
Education volume (2007) in the Cambridge
Edition of Kant’s works.
24
This work has been only partially translated
into English to date and has not received as
yet a great deal of attention though Lord, Kant
and Spinozism, Friedman, Kant and the Exact
Sciences and E. Förster, Kant’s Final Synthesis:
An Essay on the Opus Postumum (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) have
addressed it. Given the problems associated
with this work, problems including the diffi-
culty of assessing the way the parts of it should
be ordered, it has to be said it is, as yet, not
a work that can be seen as having joined the
ranks of Kant’s ‘major works’, which is why it
has not been treated in the ‘Key Works’ section
of this companion.
25
A. Laywine, Kant’s Early Metaphysics & the
Origins of the Critical Philosophy (Atascadero:
Ridgeview, 1990) gave one response to this
area though M. Schönfeld, The Philosophy of
the Young Kant: The Precritical Project (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000) is much
more comprehensive in focus. The discussion
of this area in English-language treatment is,
however, surely still in its infancy.
 PART I:
KEY WRITINGS
 1
KEY WORKS
The objective of this chapter is to set out an
analysis of the contents of all of Kant’s major
works. The works are assessed in a way that
enables the reader to gain a general overview
of Kant’s arguments in specific sections and the
chronological order in which they are presented
should further help the reader to see the means
by which Kant’s work developed. In the proc-
ess of seeing the general rationale of the works
examined, the reader will also discover some-
thing about the types of controversies that exist
with regard to the interpretations of the works
in question though it is not intended that these
entries should do more than indicate these con-
troversies. The views expressed on the works
in this chapter will not always coincide with
those found elsewhere in this Companion as is
to be expected with a work that incorporates a
commitment to pluralism. Unlike the other sec-
tions of this Companion, the present chapter is
entirely composed by one hand, so as to facili-
tate the formation of an overall view of Kant’s
philosophical achievement. – GB
THE ONLY POSSIBLE ARGUMENT IN
SUPPORT OF A DEMONSTRATION OF
THE EXISTENCE OF GOD (OPD)
This piece was first published in December 1762
and was given a substantial and favourable
11
review by Moses Mendelssohn, a review that
began the process of establishing Kant’s reputa-
tion as a major philosopher. In some respects,
this work gathered together thoughts Kant had
published in earlier writings. For example, the
piece includes the claim that existence is not a
predicate, which, in its reiterated form in CPR,
was influential as a response to the Cartesian
ontological argument.
However, it is not here that Kant first
published this criticism as it appeared earlier
in ND in 1755 (ND 394). Similarly, in this
work Kant publishes a detailed statement of
a mechanistic account of the origins of the
solar system though in so doing he essen-
tially presents a digest of the account given
in his earlier NH, published in 1755. Despite
these points, there are some substantial rea-
sons why this piece attracted the attention of
Mendelssohn although to explain what they
are requires a detailed description of the con-
tents of the piece.
The ‘Preface’ indicates that the intention
of the piece had been to provide a rough
outline of a main draft and that some of the
arguments considered have not been demon-
strated to have a distinct connection with the
conclusion. The work contains three main
sections, which are uneven in terms of length
and importance.
The first section is devoted to providing
the argument promised in the title of the
KEY WORKS
piece. Here Kant demonstrates why exist-
ence is not a real predicate, in the proc-
ess arguing against positions of Wolff and
Baumgarten. We are asked to conceive of a
subject and draw up all the predicates that
may be thought to belong to it and, once we
have done this, we should be able to see that
the subject in question could either exist with
these determinations or not exist. When we
are considering any ordinary subject, it is evi-
dent that God could know all the attributes
that belong to it without it following that the
being in question existed. Since this is so it
follows that existence is not a predicate of
the thing.
Kant’s explanation is that when we use the
term ‘existence’, we are predicating some-
thing not of a thing but only of our thought
of it. Ordinary language appears to possess
the surface characteristic of treating exist-
ence as a kind of predicate but this is not
what is really taking place when we use the
term ‘existence’. Existence is itself, when con-
sidered in an absolute sense, a concept whose
characteristic marks are only marginally
more simple than the concept itself. Hence
it is hardly possible to analyse the concept of
‘existence’.
After stating this point, Kant moves on
to showing that the internal possibility of
all things presupposes that there must exist
something as without this there would be no
grounds for anything. This leads to a connec-
tion between possibility and actuality and
the point of this is to show that there is a
notion of possibility that is ‘real’.
Kant moves next to absolutely necessary
existence as the ground of the possibility of
anything actual as without there being some-
thing necessary there would be no grounds
for there being something at all. The real
importance of the argument consists not so
much in its being a ground for thinking that
12
there exists a God as in demonstrating that
the notion of possibility has to be understood
in a different sense to the logical one if it is to
relate to actuality.
The second main section purports to show
how the mode of proof of the first section is
useful but does not really do this. Instead, in
this section, Kant surveys a posteriori argu-
ments for the existence of God, which he pur-
ports to take seriously but in which instead
other matters are manifested. For example,
the unity in the manifold of the essence of
things is shown by reference to the properties
of space and this shows the extent to which
space is already pictured by Kant as an intui-
tive construction.
Similarly, the discussion of demonstrating
the unity of the manifold by reference to laws
of motion shows a commitment to seeing
these laws as having something necessary in
them. Kant here also discusses Maupertuis’
principle of the greatest economy of action,
a principle he takes here to demonstrate the
need to link the laws of motion to the very
thought of matter.
Subsequent discussions include the pro-
pensity of adaptation in nature, the need to
understand events in nature in a way that
removes references to miracles and the refor-
mulation of ‘physico-theology’ to ensure that
universal laws of nature are always sought
behind each phenomenon. A short digest of
the mechanistic account of the solar system
is also provided.
The concluding third section shows that
the a posteriori arguments apparently taken
seriously in the second section are none of
them possible grounds for an argument
showing the existence of God. Kant here
concludes the point concerning existence and
predication raised in the first section, dem-
onstrating from it the impossibility of the
Cartesian ontological proof. Kant now treats

the argument of the first section as the basis
of a revised ontological proof and shows
that a posteriori arguments, by contrast, can
attain only probability at best and are insuf-
ficient to establish the existence of a supreme
being even probabilistically.
The final section also includes a wry com-
ment that suggests that Kant does not take the
proof of the first section even that seriously.
The real weight of the piece concerns the need
to see possibility differently from the way it
is approached in logic, on the one hand, and
the right way for philosophy to approach the
investigation of nature on the other.
The Inaugural Dissertation (ID)
This work, officially titled De mundi sensi-
bilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis,
was originally written in Latin to inaugurate
Kant’s professorship and was the subject of
a public disputation. It was probably written
between March and August 1770, in some
haste, according to Kant’s own account,
and initially published for the 1771 book
fair in Königsberg in a limited edition but
also distributed by Kant to Marcus Herz,
Johann Lambert, Johann Sulzer and Moses
Mendelssohn. This distribution produced, in
response, some important objections to the
work.
ID is sometimes characterized as belong-
ing to Kant’s ‘Critical’ period and has even
been described as his first ‘Critical’ work
though, as we shall see, there are problems
with seeing it that way and it is perhaps bet-
ter understood as a transitional work. It is
divided into five sections. The first section
is concerned with the concept of a world in
general. In discussing the notion of a world,
Kant first describes it in mereological terms
13
Key Works
as a whole which is not a part as opposed to
a simple which is a part that is not a whole.
Subsequently, however, he moves from this
analysis to a concern with the genesis of the
concepts in question describing the differ-
ence between ‘ideas of the understanding’
and the ‘laws of intuition’. The former are
governed by processes of analysis, and the
latter by synthesis. The introduction of this
difference requires reference to time in the
latter case and to the point that it is possible
for the mind to entertain ideas which cannot
be made concrete in intuition.
The Concept of the World
After these opening moves have been made,
Kant goes on to give a definition of the con-
cept of a world through the distinction of
three factors. The first is matter, the parts of
which are understood here to be substances.
The second is form which co-ordinates the
substances together (in accord with Kant’s
notion of synthesis) and involves mutual
determination in this case. For a world to be
given as a unity, it is required that the sub-
stances are capable of influence upon each
other as otherwise one is left with a plural-
ity of worlds that have no connection (an
argument with some ancestry in Kant’s work
going back to ND and even his initial piece
LF). So a connection between the possible
influences of the substances is essential to the
form of the world and the form has to remain
constant and invariable.
The third element is entirety or absolute
totality of component parts. With this notion,
Kant describes certain antinomies involved
in thinking the notion of absolute totality if
we think of substances as given either succes-
sively or simultaneously and thus requires in
the latter case discussion of the conditions of
intuition.
KEY WORKS
The Sensible and the Intelligible
The second section concerns the distinction
between sensible and intelligible things in
general, a distinction which certainly appears
to require further discussion given the con-
clusion of the first section. This section begins
with a description of sensibility as involving
the receptivity of a subject, namely, their
capacity to be affected by some object. By
contrast, intelligibility is the capacity to rep-
resent something that cannot come before the
senses. The object of sensibility is classed as
phenomenon, that of intelligibility, the nou-
menon. We appear here to have arrived at a
cardinal Critical distinction but that it is not
this yet becomes clear when Kant glosses this
difference further. In so doing, Kant presents
the thinking that is involved with phenom-
ena as a representation of how things appear,
while that of representations of noumena is
how things are.
In sensory cognition, there is a distinc-
tion between form and matter where the
latter refers to sensation as evidence for the
presence of something whereas the former
provides a law that is inherent in the mind
by means of which it co-ordinates together,
or synthesizes, that which has been sensed.
After making this distinction, Kant follows
up with a different one, concerning this time
the use of the understanding. Concepts of the
understanding are now divided in terms of
their use between ‘real use’ and ‘logical use’ (a
distinction reminiscent of both the earlier Inq
and OPD). The ‘real’ use gives the concepts
of the things or relations ‘themselves’ while
the ‘logical’ use defines the means by which
concepts are presented in relation to each
other (through hierarchical combinations).
So if we are dealing with sensible concepts,
these are combined together and their com-
bination is distinct from that of intelligible
14
concepts and it is never possible to move,
by combination alone, from the sensible to
the intelligible. So the most universal empiri-
cal laws are still sensory concepts as are the
most exact rules of geometry. Kant sketches a
process of concept formation that shows that
sensible concepts become more general by a
process of comparison and combination. As
these concepts increase in generality so we
arrive at a sense of ‘experience’ while Kant
contends that prior to this stage we only have
‘appearances’.
The concepts that have a ‘real’ use arise
from the nature of the understanding itself
and do not include any form of sensitive ele-
ment. For this reason, Kant refers to them as
‘pure ideas’ and distinguishes them from the
abstract concepts that arise in experience.
Having made these distinctions, Kant can
now explain his opposition to the rational-
ist conception that the sensible is a ‘confused’
form of the intelligible by pointing out that
while geometry is sensible in genesis it is exact
and distinct whereas metaphysics, which is in
principle the pure science, is often character-
ized by confusion. Kant uses the term ‘meta-
physics’ here to stand for an enquiry into the
first principles of the use of pure understand-
ing. What is carried out in ID is distinguished
from ‘metaphysics’ so understood, as what
this work does is merely a propaedeutic for
metaphysics.
The concepts of the understanding have
two basic uses, the first of which is negative,
namely to keep the distinction between the
sensible and the intelligible clear. The second
use is to describe the pure concepts of under-
standing in pure sciences. In our cognition,
we can only relate to the understanding by
symbols and not through singular concepts.
The common principle of what belongs to
the sensible, by contrast, is its representa-
tion by means of singular concepts, those of

space and time. Through these singular con-
cepts, we can attain to a science that is based
only on quantity, namely pure mathematics
including under this heading geometry, pure
mechanics and arithmetic.
Principles of the Sensible World
The third section discusses the principles of
the form of the sensible world. This section
importantly anticipates the Transcendental
Aesthetic of CPR though there are some dif-
ferences. A minor one is that time is treated
prior to space, a more important difference
being the lack of distinction between meta-
physical and transcendental expositions.
Seven arguments are presented with regard
to time and only five with regard to space.
Common to both are the arguments aiming
to show that they are not notions derived
from the senses, that they are singular and
not general, that they are intuitions, that they
are not ‘objective and real’ and yet that they
are indisputably true conditions of sensitive
cognition. Additionally with regard to time,
Kant here seeks to show that it is a continu-
ous magnitude and connects this argument
to a discussion of Leibniz’s principle of con-
tinuity. Further, Kant asserts that time is an
absolutely first formal principle of the sen-
sible world, something not stated of space.
Although very similar arguments are pre-
sented in CPR Kant does not, in ID, explic-
itly argue that space and time are a priori
cognitions.
Principles of the Intelligible World
The fourth section concerns the principle of
the form of the intelligible world. Here Kant
points out that since we have only thus far
concerned ourselves with the subjective con-
ditions of sensitive cognition, we still have to
15
Key Works
determine how it is that the principle of rela-
tions between substances, which we under-
stand as their mutual interaction, holds. Kant
immediately rejects any suggestion that this
can be grounded in the mere existence of the
substances, thereby distinguishing his view
from ‘vulgar’ forms of physical influx theory.
Since the world also cannot consist of neces-
sary beings as no one necessary being would
have any relation of dependence on anything
else it follows that the world is composed of
contingent beings. These contingent beings
are also suggested to depend upon a being
which is necessary and a unique cause, a ver-
sion of the cosmological argument already
discussed in OPD. The dependence of the
substances on the necessary being is described
as a universal interaction by means of a true
physical influence or real (rather than merely
ideal) whole.
Metaphysics
The fifth and final section concerns method
in metaphysics and returns to the distinction
between what is sensitive and what belongs
to the understanding. This section is a rudi-
mentary form of the Transcendental Dialectic
in which Kant argues for the importance of
marking this distinction and the inevitable
problems that will arise if we do not. The gen-
eral character of the illusions that will ensue
if this distinction is not followed are charac-
terized by Kant as the metaphysical fallacy
of subreption and the reduction of all such is
provided by keeping concepts of the under-
standing distinct from relations of space and
time. After outlining the illusions that emerge
from contravening the distinction in question,
Kant concludes the work by laying out two
principles of harmony which are required
as without them we would hardly be able to
make any judgments about objects at all. The
KEY WORKS
first such principle is that the naturalist one
that all things in the universe take place in
accord with the order of nature. The second
is Occam’s Razor, that we ought not to multi-
ply principles beyond necessity and the third
is that nothing material comes into being or
passes away. In concluding with these princi-
ples, Kant again anticipates part of the argu-
ment of the Dialectic, namely, that touching
upon regulative ideas of pure reason.
It can be seen when the work is examined
with care that there are important differences
between the views expressed in it and what
is to come in CPR. The suggestion that intel-
ligible principles describe what really is, as
opposed to what appears, indicates a residue
of rationalism here that CPR later renounced.
However, the arguments concerning sensible
cognition are the principal part of the work
and already contain much that is to become
cardinal in the Critical philosophy.
Critique of Pure Reason (CPR)
After completion of ID, Kant passed a decade
without publishing, which is often referred
to as his ‘silent decade’. During this period
he reflected on ID in his correspondence and
raised a question concerning it in a letter to
Marcus Herz that has often been taken to be
significant in relation to the formation of the
horizon that led to the publication of CPR.
This was in a letter dated 21 February 1772
in which Kant refers to the ‘key to the whole
secret of metaphysics’ as residing in the ques-
tion: ‘What is the ground of the relation of
that in us which we call “representation” to
the object?’ (Corr-I 130) This question, gen-
erally known as the question of the ‘Herz let-
ter’ (although Kant also wrote many other
significant letters to Herz) does mark a
16
movement away from the stance of ID since
it includes a reflective question that requires
an investigation of ‘representation’.
Stress on this notion also formed part of
the horizon of the first generation of inter-
pretations of CPR following the precedent of
Reinhold. Allied with the question raised in
the so-called Herz letter is Kant’s remark in
P that it was considering ‘Hume’s problem’
that awoke him from his previous ‘dogmatic
slumber’. As with the question in the let-
ter to Herz so also the nature of what Kant
took ‘Hume’s problem’ to consist in has been
variously interpreted. In the passage in P in
which Kant refers to this ‘problem’, however,
he gives a clear statement of what he took it
to reside in when he remarks: ‘We cannot at
all see why, in consequence of the existence
of one thing, another must necessarily exist,
or how the concept of such a combination
can arise a priori.’ (P 257; trans. Ellington)
Despite Kant’s stress on this question in P,
there is considerable debate as to whether
CPR offers any kind of sustained response
to it and responses to CPR, from as early as
Salomon Maimon, have denied that it does
present a serious reply to Hume. The combi-
nation of the question Kant arrived at in the
so-called ‘Herz letter’ with ‘Hume’s problem’
will be suggested here to provide the basis for
interpreting Kant’s most famous work.
CPR was initially published in 1781 and,
despite the length of its germination, there is
some suggestion it was written hastily. One
of the recurrent themes of interpretation of
it has concerned whether there are various
strata contained within its text. Norman
Kemp Smith and Hans Vaihinger both pro-
moted the conception of a ‘patch-work’ view
of CPR based on the suggestion that it con-
tained ‘pre-Critical’ elements that Kant never
got around to excising. This suggestion was
presented initially on the basis of the claim

that different passages refer to different peri-
ods of Kant’s development but contemporary
adherents of the ‘patchwork’ view no longer
present it in this way. Following the lead of
Dieter Henrich, both Howard Caygill and
Paul Guyer have argued that the ‘patchwork’
notion is a way of presenting a certain kind
of hermeneutic approach that stresses prob-
lems and tensions in the text rather than res-
olutions.1 H. J. Paton’s commentary is often
presented as opposed to the principle of this
reading but careful reading of Paton shows
that he also often manifests it (for exam-
ple, in his account of the Transcendental
Deduction).2 The ‘patchwork’ reading is,
nonetheless, rightly controversial and many
contemporary writers reject both early and
late versions of it in favour of stress on a uni-
tary conception of the work.
A further element that produces difficulty
in interpreting the work is the history of its
publication. After first being published in
1781, CPR was subjected to a hostile recep-
tion in the shape of the notorious Garve-Feder
review, which treated the central doctrines of
the work as essentially of a piece with those
of George Berkeley, a view that incensed
Kant. In response, Kant worked at revising
CPR and he rewrote substantial parts of it,
especially the Transcendental Deduction and
the Paralogisms. Elsewhere in CPR he added
important sections, changed titles and formu-
lations of principles and deleted much. The
fact that two distinct editions hence exist
has further divided critics who have tended
to stress one edition rather than another.
Schopenhauer famously argued that the ide-
alism of the first edition was compromised
in the second and hence favoured the first
edition. Conversely, twentieth-century phi-
losophers from the phenomenological tradi-
tion have favoured the first edition, following
the lead of Husserl and Heidegger, due to a
17
Key Works
preference for the views on time allegedly
expressed there. Analytic philosophers, by
contrast, have followed the lead of the neo-
Kantians, in stressing the alleged ‘objectivity’
of the second edition. While these disputes are
not without importance it is not obvious that
they have contributed to greater clarity con-
cerning either the central views expressed in
CPR or much understanding of the rationale
for the changes Kant made in its structure.
The Structure and Content of
the‘Critique of Pure Reason’
The organization of CPR elaborates and
reflects Kant’s growing passion for ordered
exposition. The penultimate chapter of the
whole work discusses ‘architectonic’ and
the work exhibits continuous concern with
it. Many critics allege that this concern is to
the detriment of Kant’s discussion but with-
out attention being paid to it much that is
important gets lost. The work is formally
divided into two large and asymmetrical
parts, the first of which, the Transcendental
Doctrine of Elements, being much the largest
and being itself subdivided. The other part of
the work concerns the Doctrine of Method
and has been rarely accorded the empha-
sis it deserves. The Doctrine of Elements is
again divided into two asymmetrical parts,
the first part of which, the Transcendental
Aesthetic, is much briefer than the second, the
Transcendental Logic. The Transcendental
Logic is the major part both of the Doctrine
of Elements and of the whole work, incorpo-
rating both the Transcendental Analytic and
the Transcendental Dialectic.
The Prefaces to the ‘Critique’
Prior to encountering this intensive pattern
of divisions, the reader first comes to the
KEY WORKS
prefaces to the two editions of the work and
its ‘Introduction’. All of these are important
in manifesting stresses on key elements of the
work as a whole. The ‘Preface’ to the second
edition is more than twice the length of the
‘Preface’ to the first and it is in the second edi-
tion ‘Preface’ that some of the most famous
formulations of CPR’s general point, method
and problem are given. However, the ‘Preface’
to the first edition opens with a general claim
concerning human reason and its predilec-
tion for asking questions that it is unable to
answer but feels compelled to ask (Avii).
This already foreshadows the general task
of the Transcendental Dialectic and leads
Kant to bemoaning the state that metaphysics
has fallen into. In response, Kant announces
the need for reason to come to a reflective
awareness of itself, much as he appeared to
be articulating in the so-called ‘Herz letter’
(Corr-I 132–139). This call is now presented
as requiring a critique of pure reason in the
sense that it is necessary to discover what can
be asserted that is independent of experience:
‘[B]ecause the chief question always remains:
“What and how much can understanding
and reason cognize free of all experience?”’
(Axvii). At the same time as raising this as the
key question, Kant also does admit that there
is a second side to his enquiry that concerns
the possibility of pure understanding itself but
which he indicates is of less importance to its
outcome, an assertion of questionable status.
Kant also uses the vocabulary of the ‘tribunal
of reason’ in terms of assessing the claims of
parties in disputes, a metaphor that returns
subsequently both in the Transcendental
Deduction and in the Antinomies.
The ‘Preface’ to the second edition opens
with a lamentation over the state of meta-
physics and a suggestion of a need for its
reformation, something that the work being
presented is evidently intended to help bring
18
about. In this ‘Preface’, however, the stress
of the problem with ‘metaphysics’ is more
sharply defined since now it is alleged that
this problem concerns its lack of ‘scientific’
status, a point not raised in the ‘Preface’ to
the first edition. Concomitant with this stress
on ‘science’ is an extended analysis of how
various other disciplines have attained a ‘sci-
entific’ status.
The first ‘science’ so investigated is math-
ematics and the conception of its formation
that Kant presents is significant in terms of
how he will later present the task for philoso-
phy. The ‘true method’ that put mathemat-
ics on the path of a science, Kant alleges,
was demonstrated with regard to how to
determine the properties of an isosceles tri-
angle and this consisted in attending to the
‘construction’ of the object (Bxii). Similarly,
‘natural science’ generally is said to have
been capable of its breakthroughs by fol-
lowing the clue that ‘reason has insight only
into that which it produces after a plan of its
own’ (Bxiii). Given that these are the ways
that these other disciplines have attained
the status of a ‘science’, it is less surprising
than many have been inclined to think that
Kant presents the requisite procedure for
metaphysics to reside in a mimetic relation
to these other ‘sciences’. This again involves
relating to the need for reason to have a plan
of its own and to determine what is given to
it in relation to this plan. As Kant puts this,
in relation to the problem announced in the
‘Preface’ to the first edition, ‘we can know
a priori of things only what we ourselves put
into them’ (Bxviii). This is often referred to as
Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ though this is
not a phrase used by Kant who instead refers
to operating in accord with Copernicus’ ‘pri-
mary hypothesis’. This consists in altering
the perspective concerning what we regard
as stable and what as moving with the result

that ‘objects’ (the concern of the ‘Herz letter’)
be now treated as required to conform to our
‘intuition’.
That the change in point of view that
enables science and mathematics to have
attained their altered status is not only due
to Copernicus is, however, later stated in a
footnote in which Kant refers to Copernicus’
change as only having been a hypothetical
one by contrast to the discovery of the cen-
tral laws of motion of the heavenly bodies
carried out by Newton who demonstrated
by means of such laws what binds the uni-
verse together. So it is not that there was a
once-and-for-all Copernican ‘revolution’ that
Kant wishes to follow but rather that the pri-
mary thought-experiment or hypothesis that
Copernicus advocated of turning the perspec-
tive around is similarly taken in the ‘Preface’
to the second edition of CPR to draw atten-
tion in this prefatory statement to the need
for a transformation to first get adopted as
a hypothesis though CPR itself, Kant states,
will show ‘apodictically’, not hypotheti-
cally, the point of viewing space and time in
a different way than has been done by phi-
losophers hitherto. Hence the Copernicus
reference, when seen in general context, is
meant to show that the Critical philosophy
carries out not a ‘Copernican revolution’ but
rather a ‘Newtonian’ one.
Kant’s aim of altering the procedure of
metaphysics is now said to be the basis of
metaphysics subsequently becoming scien-
tific so that CPR itself is not taken to present
a system of metaphysics but only a treatise
on its method (Bxxii), which accords with the
insertion at the front of the second edition
of an epigraph from Bacon. From this point
about method Kant derives a first discus-
sion of the need for the distinction between
appearances and things in themselves, the
distinction between the possibilities of
19
Key Works
pure speculative reason and practical rea-
son and also a discussion of the difference
between thinking and knowing, none of
which are, from the standpoint of the reader
of the ‘Preface’, as yet very clear. Kant also
here alludes to the need for metaphysics to
address problems concerning the existence
of God, the nature of the soul and the status
of freedom. Kant refers to the changes in the
text from the first edition while denying that
any of his key views have been. It should be
added that a footnote included towards the
close of the ‘Preface’ to this second edition
also includes changes to the ‘proof’ of the
Refutation of Idealism (Bxxxix–Bxli), which
a number of commentators have judged to be
very important.
The ‘Introduction’ to the ‘Critique’
The ‘Introduction’ to CPR is the place where
Kant defines a number of key terms. Firstly,
the point is made that to determine the ‘a
priori’ we have to uncover whether there is
knowledge that is independent of the senses
and the second edition even refers to cogni-
tion that is ‘absolutely independent of all
experience’ (B3). Two criteria are determined
for something’s being a priori: that it is neces-
sary (and if it is derived only from something
else that is necessary then it is absolutely a
priori [B3]) and, secondly, that it has ‘strict’
universality. Having determined the a priori
in this way, Kant moves to distinguishing
between analytic and synthetic judgments –
with the key criteria concerning the principle
of contradiction (B12) – in order to arrive at
his revolutionary notion of the synthetic a
priori.
The claim is subsequently made (again
an innovation of the second edition) that all
theoretical sciences of reason include syn-
thetic a priori judgments as principles. This
KEY WORKS
is illustrated with discussion of mathemat-
ics, physics and metaphysics with the argu-
ment emerging that until the possibility of
synthetic a priori judgments has been shown
the general status of metaphysics cannot
be solved. This point is also explicitly con-
nected to ‘Hume’s problem’ with causation
(B19). Kant concludes the ‘Introduction’
with a description of the notion of the ‘cri-
tique of pure reason’ as a special type of
‘science’ that is the propaedeutic to true
transcendental philosophy. Kant describes
that which is transcendental as all cognition
occupied not so much with objects directly
as with the possibility of relating to them a
priori (A12=B25). But the full idea of the ‘sci-
ence’ of transcendental philosophy cannot be
carried out in CPR as it is not an exhaus-
tive account of human cognition as ‘it carries
the analysis only so far as is requisite for the
complete examination of knowledge which is
a priori and synthetic’ (A14=B28).
The Transcendental Aesthetic
The Transcendental Aesthetic is the first
major division of the Doctrine of Elements
and, while relatively brief, contains much
that is important. The purpose of this sec-
tion is to discern what must belong to sen-
sibility a priori (as opposed to what has to
belong to conceptuality a priori). The argu-
ment of it has a careful character though one
that is not always respected. Kant explicitly
points out that here he specifically isolates
sensibility from understanding despite hav-
ing the general purpose of showing their
synthetic combination. In isolating sensibil-
ity, he seeks both to show what has to belong
to it empirically and what has to belong to
it entirely purely. In the course of examin-
ing these questions, Kant first introduces the
specific term of art ‘intuition’ (Anschauung).
20
‘Intuition’ describes an immediate relation
that cognition has with ‘objects’ in the sense
that all thought has to involve it. Such an
‘immediate’ relation arises, however, from
cognition generally being affected and such
affection occurs, for us, through sensibility.
What has to belong to the empirical element
of sensibility is sensation whereas what has
to belong to ‘intuition’ purely is that which
orders sensation and is not derived from it.
The latter includes the Cartesian elements
of ‘body’, namely ‘extension and figure’
(A21=B35) though not the Leibnizian addi-
tion, ‘force’, which will be revealed rather to
require a connection of pure intuition to pure
concepts.
The subsequent work of the Transcendental
Aesthetic concerns the forms of pure sensi-
ble intuition, which are argued to be two-
fold, namely, the forms of space and time.
Representation of objects is argued to require
space as it is only through space that we have
a sense of shape and magnitude while time
enables a sense of having inner states. The
discussions of space and time that follow are
largely parallel and the account of space, for
most commentators, is the one that receives
most attention since Kant treats it first. These
accounts also relate to the parallel ones in
ID. The general arguments first establish
that neither space nor time can be said to
be ‘empirical concepts’ since all empirical
descriptions presuppose them and that they
are both ‘necessary’ representations since
we can represent nothing without them. The
first arguments have two foci: one positive
and one negative. The negative point is that
space and time are a priori as no particular
experience could lead us to the conception of
them. Hence this lack of particularity is indi-
rectly thought to show that they are univer-
sal. The positive element of the argument, by
contrast, is that space and time are necessary

conceptions. So the two distinct criteria of
the a priori are argued to attach to space and
time, albeit by means of different types of
argument.
Kant next provides claims for the intuitive
nature of space and time. Whereas the initial
account of intuition stressed immediacy and
receptivity however, Kant now introduces
a different understanding of intuition that
allows for seeing it as distinct from conceptu-
ality. This second determination of intuition
requires describing it as ‘singular’ in contrast
to the universality of concepts. Interestingly,
since the universality of intuition itself has
only been accounted for negatively (through
showing lack of particularity), Kant here
mainly seeks to show that intuition cannot
be described through the forms of universal-
ity that are appropriate for concepts thus
maintaining the sense that, while singular,
intuitions are also, in a peculiar sense of their
own, ‘universal’.
The two arguments for the intuitive status
of space and time follow the arguments for
their a priori status in being both negative
and positive in form. The negative arguments
present reasons for rejecting attribution to
them of conceptual status while the posi-
tive arguments are meant to provide a more
direct rationale for thinking of them as intui-
tive. The first argument is to the effect that
the representations of space and time are
unitary in themselves, not formations from
component elements. With regard to space,
this is supported by a proposition from
geometry. The second argument concerns the
claim that representation of space and time
presuppose an infinite given magnitude, the
infinitude of the givenness in question being
the ground of all finite determinations. In
the case of time, there is only a single dimen-
sion and Kant argues that the representa-
tion of this shows the necessary character of
21
Key Works
time. The formation of concepts is taken to
require a hierarchical relation between parts
and wholes while intuitions, by contrast, are
taken to involve a connection between parts
and wholes that is of a holistic not an aggre-
gative character.
These arguments, when combined with the
first set for the a priori status of space and
time, are intended to convince us that with
space and time we have a priori intuitions
that supply the a priori basis of sensibility.
The success of the arguments is controver-
sial but the point of them is at least clear.
Certain synthetic a priori judgments are also
suggested to be grounded on space and time
being conceived in this way and not to be
explained otherwise with the examples given
being (Euclidean) geometry and ‘the concept
of motion’ (B48). The discussion of geometry
has taxed much later commentary given the
rise of non-Euclidean geometries in the course
of the nineteenth century though the ques-
tion of how the latter relate to ‘space’ is less
clear than many critics allege. The account of
‘motion’ is less commonly discussed though,
in some respects, more fruitful for Kant’s
general philosophy.
Regardless of the success of the arguments
of the Transcendental Aesthetic up to this
point, they are restricted in scope. However,
Kant now turns to what he describes as a set
of ‘conclusions’ from the concepts of space
and time given but which are, in fact, distin-
guishable as claims from such concepts and
introduce us for the first time to arguments
in favour of a version of transcendental ide-
alism, a version specifically concerned, as is
natural given their place in the Transcendental
Aesthetic, with sensibility.
Two ‘conclusions’ are given with regard
to space, but three with regard to time. The
first ‘conclusion’ concerns the subjectivity of
space and time and the argument is parallel
KEY WORKS
in the two cases. Essentially Kant here claims
that space and time are not ‘properties’ of
things in general or of ‘relations’ of such
things (thus denying the specific claims of
both Newton and Leibniz). The reason why
they are not such ‘properties’ or ‘relations’ is
that abstraction from the conditions of intui-
tion, conditions that apply to our sensibility,
will leave no determinations of space or time.
These determinations have been shown to
condition our sensibility’s a priori form and
are not appropriate to anything distinct from
this. This negative claim is then re-stated in a
positive form as Kant goes on to claim that
space is only the form of outer sense, time the
form of inner sense. These points are said to
establish the empirical reality of space and
time and their transcendental ideality. Time
is argued to be more universal than space as
it is the immediate form of inner sense and
the mediate form of outer sense. Kant also
includes a specific section added to the dis-
cussion of time meant to reply to the objec-
tions to the theory given when it was first
stated in ID in correspondence.
Finally, Kant adds four ‘general observa-
tions’ on the whole argument of the Aesthetic
(three of which are added in the second edi-
tion). The first restates the point that intui-
tion only represents appearances and that
such have no existence in themselves and
that what ‘objects’ may be, apart from the
conditions of our sensibility, is something we
cannot know. Having re-stated this point,
Kant goes on to distinguish this view from
the Leibniz-Wolff conception that sensibil-
ity gives a confused representation of things
describing the latter view as giving a ‘com-
pletely wrong’ direction to investigations
into cognition (A44=B61).
Kant also argues for the exhaustiveness of
the distinctions between intuitions and con-
cepts, a priori and a posteriori. The second
22
claim asserts that everything connected to
intuition concerns relations and that ‘a
thing in itself cannot be known through
mere relations’ (B67) (a significant claim for
Schopenhauer). Thirdly, Kant denies that
the result of his discussion is the view that
‘objects’ are only illusions but rather asserts
that we only reach this result if we treat space
and time as properties of things in them-
selves (an anticipation of the argument of
the Refutation of Idealism). Fourthly, Kant
argues that if space and time were conditions
of things in general, they would also be condi-
tions of God (an anticipation of Kant’s char-
acterization of ‘Spinozism’ in CJ). The general
result of the argument of the Aesthetic is pro-
posed by Kant to be that synthetic a priori
judgments ‘can never extend beyond objects
of the senses; they are valid only for objects
of possible experience’ (B73).
The position of the Transcendental
Aesthetic in CPR and its conclusions are
both controversial. Its conclusions are con-
troversial principally due to the survival of
the alleged ‘neglected alternative’ objection.
Initially stated by F. A. Trendelenburg in his
nineteenth-century controversy with Kuno
Fischer, this objection has proved surpris-
ingly durable. The claim is to the effect that
Kant has neglected to investigate the view
that space and time might be both conditions
of our sensibility and also have an independ-
ent reality. The assertion that Kant ‘neglected’
this alternative is correct in the sense that it
is not one he explicitly considers. It is not
‘neglected’ if what is meant is that Kant has
no conceptual resources with which to deal
with it. The basic response Kant can make
here is that for space and time to be inde-
pendently ‘real’ in addition to being the forms
of sensibility would require some means to
be available for us to make sense of it. This
would have to either be through intuition or

concepts given the exhaustiveness of this divi-
sion of our cognition. But since he has shown
that the forms of intuition are distinct from
anything conceptual and that these forms are
essential to sensibility no such further means
of knowledge is available to us. Paul Guyer
presents a slight variation on this position
when he claims that Kant does not merely
deny knowledge of things in themselves but
makes positive dogmatic assertions concern-
ing the nature of the latter but there is no evi-
dence, within the argument of the Aesthetic,
for the latter claim being made by Kant.3
The Transcendental Logic
The second and much longer part of the
Doctrine of Elements is taken up by the
treatment of Transcendental Logic, a treat-
ment itself divided into two substantial
parts  – the Transcendental Analytic and the
Transcendental Dialectic. Given that the
Transcendental Aesthetic concerned the a pri-
ori elements of sensibility, it would be natural
to expect the Transcendental Logic to discuss
the a priori elements of thought. However,
only a very small portion of the Transcendental
Analytic is directly devoted to this although
the result of the whole of the argument of the
Analytic does enable a return to the discussion
of the limits of conceptuality.
The specific account of a priori concepts
is provided through the claim, made in the
context of the Metaphysical Deduction,
that the function of concepts is to for-
mulate judgments. Given this claim, Kant
proceeds to describe a Table of Judgment
that gives, on his view, a description of the
different types of functions of unity avail-
able for judgment. The table does depend
on a response to Aristotelian logic but
creatively amplifies some of its elements
including moments that are novel (such as
23
Key Works
the distinction of ‘infinite’ judgment from
affirmative and negative or the separate
consideration of ‘singular’ from universal
and particular). There is some confusion
concerning whether the ‘table’ is part of
ordinary or, as Kant terms it, ‘general’ logic
or is part of transcendental logic though the
justification given for ‘infinite’ judgments
makes plain that these are part of ‘transcen-
dental’ logic (A71–72=B97).
However, it is only after describing the
parts of the table that Kant introduces the
key notion of ‘synthesis’, the central term of
‘transcendental logic’, and thus it is at this
point that logic appears to become transcen-
dental. Synthesis involves combination of
different representations such that they are
capable of being grasped in a single mani-
fold and it is the origin of ‘real’ cognition
(A77=B103). It is first stated that pure syn-
thesis is the work of imagination here though
Kant immediately adds that for cognition to
attain unity we require concepts, a point that
leads him to distinguish between the logical
forms of judgments, already given, and the
transcendental content of representations.
The latter are described by the pure concepts
of the understanding and Kant provides
a list of them in a Table of Categories that
corresponds to the earlier Table of Judgment
though there is some controversy over how
the second table has been derived from the
first.
Once the Table of Categories has described
the pure a priori concepts the rest of the work
of the Transcendental Analytic is intended to
show, firstly the justification for assuming
these concepts are at work in our experience,
and, secondly the procedure whereby they
articulate this experience for us. The latter
occurs in the Analytic of Principles where
a series of synthetic a priori judgments are
articulated and argued for.
KEY WORKS
The Transcendental Deduction
The task of the first part is the work
of the Transcendental Deduction. The
Transcendental Deduction is one of the
major parts of CPR and was subjected to
serious revision in its second edition. This has
produced a series of divergences in the inter-
pretation of the Transcendental Deduction,
particularly between phenomenologically
oriented readers who have emphasized the
argument of the first edition and analyti-
cal readers who have tended to follow neo-
Kantian precedent in favouring the second
edition. This is only part of the problem of
interpreting the Transcendental Deduction,
however, since both versions of the argument
include distinguishable elements with the
first edition presenting a ‘preliminary’ argu-
ment prior to the main argument and the sec-
ond edition including two apparently distinct
conclusions. Kant himself also gave the basis
for a further type of division by describing
the discussion of the argument concerning
the categories as an ‘objective’ deduction by
contrast to the ‘subjective’ deduction that
emphasized considerations relating to cog-
nition. Finally, the second edition version
incorporates a sustained account of judgment
that ties the argument of the Transcendental
Deduction more closely to the Metaphysical
Deduction.
There are two main aims of the argument
of the Transcendental Deduction, aims that
are stressed in both versions of the text.
On the one hand, there is a generic argu-
ment justifying the view that we require the
use of the categories in experience and on
the other hand there is an investigation of
the means by which cognition takes place
in terms of what is often described as a
‘transcendental psychology’ (although this
is not an expression used by Kant it does
24
seem appropriate to describe the investiga-
tions in question thus). However, in prac-
tice, it proves virtually impossible to really
distinguish these strands from each other in
the detail of Kant’s argument as the appeal
to ‘transcendental psychology’ is made
throughout the discussion of the need for
the categories.
While it is impossible to summarize this
section in a manner that is not controversial,
it is standard to accept that Kant, in both
versions of this argument, presents a strong
claim for transcendental synthesis being
required for experience to be possible. This
claim involves a connection between the pos-
session of a priori concepts and the source
of there being anything like conceptuality
at all. Kant describes the latter as ‘transcen-
dental apperception’ and while the details of
the arguments vary in the two editions of the
work there is, in both versions, a connection
between this capacity and the ability to bring
together the manifold of sense by means of
‘transcendental imagination’.
The first edition version of the argument
places great stress on all cognition being
subject to time (A99) in accordance with the
argument of the Transcendental Aesthetic and
this is the key to its synthetic emphasis. The
second edition version, by contrast, empha-
sizes the dependence of representation on
‘spontaneity’ and uses this emphasis to con-
nect the capacity to form judgments to the
ultimate source of conceptuality in ‘transcen-
dental apperception’. This much would be
conceded by most interpreters but the details
of how the arguments go and the success of
them have proved deeply controversial. The
suggestion of a deep difference between the
two versions of the argument is, however,
difficult to sustain when the appearance of
the same aims and the same central notions
is noted.

The Analytic of Principles
Assuming that the argument of the
Transcendental Deduction succeeds in jus-
tifying the need for a priori concepts in the
articulation of experience, Kant next turns
to the procedure by means of which they
are connected to intuition. That such con-
nection takes place was the burden of the
emphasis on synthesis in the argument of the
Transcendental Deduction but the mechan-
ics of how this connection happens was
not explicated there. In the chapter ‘On the
Schematism’, Kant accounts for this in gen-
eral terms by stressing a relationship between
a priori concepts and a priori intuition
through the form of time. Time is as univer-
sal as the concepts and yet, also, as part of the
conditions of sensibility, is meant to mediate
the connection of concepts to sensibility. In
some respects, the absence of discussion of
space in the account of transcendental sche-
matism is surprising (particularly given that
Kant does, independently, describe a ‘pure
sensible’ schema that does involve space) and,
indeed, this want later has to be made good
when Kant goes on to ‘apply’ the schema in
the subsequent argument of the Analytic.
Placing the categories under the conditions
of a priori intuition essentially produces the
specific principles of the rest of the Analytic,
which is organized in accordance with the
Table of Categories. Schematizing the cat-
egories produces Kant’s Principles. From the
schematization of the categories of quantity
we arrive at the Axioms of Intuition, sche-
matizing the categories of quality produces
the Anticipations of Perception, schematiz-
ing the categories of relation produces the
Analogies of Experience and, finally, sche-
matizing the categories of modality produces
the Postulates of Empirical Thought. All of
these parts are worth examining in detail as
25
Key Works
is the division between the first two set of
principles and the second set.
Kant describes the principles of the Axioms
and the Anticipations as ‘mathematical’
in nature while those of the Analogies and
Postulates are, by contrast, termed ‘dynami-
cal’. This distinction is meant to indicate the
diverse things made possible by the principles
as the ‘mathematical’ principles are not prin-
ciples of mathematics but are rather principles
that make mathematics (in a certain sense)
possible (and similarly with the dynamical
principles). So the division between them is
essentially that the mathematical principles
are principles of intuition while the dynami-
cal ones are rather principles that relate to
the existence of things for us.
The Analogies of Experience
By far the lion’s share of commentary on
these principles has, however, been taken up
responding to the principles of the Analogies
of Experience and there are a number of rea-
sons why this is so. The most obvious one is
that it is here that Kant formulates a view of
causality which has been often presented as
his ‘reply’ to ‘Hume’s problem’ and it is also
with the ‘analogies’ that we get something
like a clear view of ‘objects’ and their relation
to ‘representations’ (thus a response to the
question of the so-called Herz letter).
There is a general principle of all the anal-
ogies in addition to there being principles for
each of the three specific analogies. The sec-
ond edition version of the general principle
states that experience is possible only through
‘the representation of a necessary connection
of perceptions’ (B218) and this makes more
precise the first edition formulation that
referred to a priori rules of time (A177). The
specific argument for the general principle
includes an attempt to disambiguate distinct
KEY WORKS
senses of ‘experience’ in order to justify the
specifically Kantian notion announced in the
second edition formula. The argument also
relates the necessary unity of apperception
to the empirical consciousness of percep-
tion by means of connecting it to the three
modes of time. Kant here also indicates the
reason for talking of ‘analogies’ by discuss-
ing qualitative relations and how, from them,
we gain a priori cognition of a relation with-
out it being the case that we have the deter-
minate sense of what this is a relation with
(A179–180=B222).
The three analogies are schemas of the cate-
gories of relation with the first relating the cat-
egory of substance to time. The unschematized
notion of substance is as a subject of predica-
tion while the schematized form of it gives us
the notion of sempiternality or ‘permanence’.
While the first edition formula describes the
permanent as the ‘object itself’ (A182), the
second edition, controversially, states a conser-
vation principle (B224). This analogy, like the
other two, includes as part of its argument the
assertion that time itself cannot be perceived
and that, in the absence of time, something
analogous to it has to be given which, in this
case, is substance in the field of appearance
(B225). The general argument that there must
be something persistent that enables the recog-
nition of change is at least as old as Aristotle
but is here applied only to the sphere of appear-
ances. Alteration is, by this means, indicated to
be something that only affects the determina-
tions of substances and not these substances
themselves. Kant refers to an ‘empirical crite-
rion’ of necessary permanence in his conclu-
sion of the argument (A189=B232) but does
not supply it within the argument itself, a first
signal that the arguments for the three analo-
gies are interdependent.
The Second Analogy is by the far most
famous of the three and has attracted some
26
of the most extensive treatment in the sec-
ondary literature (only the Transcendental
Deduction being ahead in this regard). The
formulation of the principle changes some-
what between the two editions with the
first edition emphasizing that what happens
begins to be according to a rule (A189) while
the second, much more explicitly, states that
alteration takes place in conformity with
cause and effect (B232). Since the argument
of the First Analogy had treated the notion
of ‘alteration’, the second edition treat-
ment effectively begins from where the First
Analogy left off.
While the argument of the Second Analogy
is, by the standards of CPR, fairly long, and
appears to involve a number of elements,
most contemporary commentary focuses
on trying to unravel the general argument
rather than, like the classic commentaries
of Kemp Smith and Paton, subdividing into
sets of sub-arguments. The major dispute
concerning the Second Analogy is between
‘weak’ and ‘strong’ readings of its claim. The
‘strong’ reading focuses on claiming that the
argument must commit Kant to showing that
if we have the same cause we will have the
same effect (SCSE), the ‘weak’ reading, by
contrast, suggests that all Kant need show
is that for every effect there is some cause
(EESC). The dispute between these readings,
despite having the character of a local tex-
tual argument, has some large implications
for how the Critical philosophy is viewed.
Alongside the contention over which prin-
ciple Kant is aiming to prove in the Second
Analogy, there are also disputes over which
argument is the one which will have to sus-
tain the main premise. For reasons which are
somewhat obscure, since at least the reading
of Peter Strawson4 there has been a tendency
to emphasize the first of the arguments Kant
considers in the text of the Second Analogy,

the so-called ‘irreversibility argument’. The
consensus on this is surprising, not least since
Strawson’s own emphasis on it was intended
to show the failure of the argument.
However, what few other than Paul
Guyer and Gary Banham5 have attempted
to emphasize is that the argument must not
only be about the notion of causality but also
be connected to the sense that Kant is gen-
erally giving to the ‘object of representation’
(or, otherwise put, to an intentional sense
of objectivity). Kant does, however, raise
this point explicitly early in the argument
(A189–190=B234–235). After restating the
point that we need the distinction between
appearances and things-in-themselves, Kant
goes on to point out that this raises a specific
question: ‘What, then, am I to understand by
the question: how the manifold may be con-
nected in the appearance itself, which yet is
nothing in itself?’ (A191=B236).
Assuming that the manifold united in the
representation gives us what we term an
‘object’, then there is required a rule which
enables us to distinguish any given such par-
ticular one from every other one. ‘The object
is that in the appearance which contains the
condition of this necessary rule of apprehen-
sion.’ (A191=B236) The discussion of this
point, directly relevant to the problem of the
‘Herz letter’, immediately precedes the ‘irre-
versibility argument’. In this, Kant stresses
the need for appearances to be presented
in continuity as, without this, there would
be times that were empty of content. This
point is meant to show that it is a necessary
requirement that perceptions are related to
each other.
Kant subsequently introduces a contrast
between a ‘house’ and a ‘ship’, a contrast
widely misinterpreted. Kant here uses these
empirical examples to reach the point that
we need a distinction between ‘subjective’
27
Key Works
and ‘objective’ succession and that the former
must be parasitic upon the latter as without
the sense of ‘objective succession’ being pri-
mary there would be no settled permanence
for ‘subjective succession’ (whose manifold is
only that of ‘inner sense’) to attach to. This
leads to the provisional conclusion that the
rule referred to in the principle of the Second
Analogy is one that asserts that events have a
necessary order of appearance (A194=B239).
‘[T]he occurrence, as the conditioned, yields
a secure indication of some condition, but it
is the latter that determines the occurrence.’
(A194=B239) This view is contrasted with
the Humean one that sees the notion of cau-
sation arising genetically from perception and
comparison, as on Kant’s view no such per-
ception and comparison of particulars could
take place without a pre-existing rule which
distinguished them from one another. Kant
is explicit in viewing this point as requir-
ing a sense of ‘continuity’ (A199=B244 and
A209=B254), a point that ‘weak’ readings of
the principle generally do not refer to.
The Third Analogy schematizes the cate-
gory of community or coexistence in order to
connect mutual interaction with the notion
of simultaneity. The second edition version of
the principle is, again, sharper than the first
edition version including, as it does, a refer-
ence to space. As in the other two analogies,
Kant makes much of the point that time itself
cannot be perceived and thus for a temporal
notion such as simultaneity to make sense
for us, something in our experience has to
‘stand in’ for time. Since simultaneity could
not be revealed by reference to the synthesis
of imagination, as this would be insufficient
to establish when things were co-existent, we
require a pure concept and this is the one of
mutual interaction of substances.
Subsequent to the treatment of the three
analogies, Kant discusses first the Postulates,
KEY WORKS
which schematize the principle of modality
and then the distinction between phenomena
and noumena, in which latter Kant articu-
lates a difference between positive and nega-
tive references to noumena in preparation
for the Transcendental Dialectic. Finally, the
‘Appendix’ to the Transcendental Analytic
explicitly introduces the notion of ‘concepts
of reflection’ although there is a good case for
thinking they were implicitly being referred
to earlier in the work. These concepts are
four paired groups that effectively describe
conditions for formulation of how other con-
cepts are possible (which must surely include
the categories). The explicit purpose for their
introduction is to provide a Critical riposte
to the debate between Locke and Leibniz
showing ways in which both failed to respect
the transcendental distinction but the discus-
sion of the concepts of reflection is one that
has large potential implications for under-
standing the argument of the Transcendental
Deduction.
The Transcendental Dialectic
The second part of the Transcendental Logic
is taken up by the Transcendental Dialectic.
This concerns, as Kant states at the outset, a
‘logic of illusion’ (A293=B349) which traces
the destructive effect of crossing the tran-
scendental distinction and is hence termed
‘transcendental illusion’. One of the dif-
ficulties of discussing transcendental illu-
sion is that detection of it is not sufficient
to cease its operation (as would be the case
with logical illusion). In order to explain
this, Kant finally arrives at his discussion
of ‘reason’, something that comes relatively
late in a book apparently concerned with
its critique! Reason is initially described as
concerned with ‘principles’, and ‘principles’
are then defined as involving cognition ‘in
28
which I cognize the particular in the univer-
sal through concepts’ (A300=B357). This
definition leads to viewing the procedure of
reason as typically taking place by means of
syllogisms.
The next key point is that reason, unlike
understanding, is not concerned with the
unification of appearances by means of
rules but rather with the unification of the
rules of understanding under principles
(A302=B358). Pure reason, by contrast to a
limited empirical reason, is concerned with
relating all conditioned claims to cognition
to something that is unconditioned. On the
basis of this general account of reason, Kant
determines the ‘concepts’ of reason to be
‘ideas’ and describes these as concepts that
transcend the possibility of experience and
thus as not being capable of being given in
intuition (A327=B383). The subsequent dis-
cussion of specific problems and illusions is
all guided by this general account.
The Paralogisms
The first part of Kant’s discussion of illusions
is the account of the Paralogisms of pure
reason, a section elaborately reconstructed
in the second edition of CPR. A ‘paralogism’
is a pseudo-syllogism, which is, however,
grounded in the nature of human reason,
as follows from the general account of the
procedure of the Dialectic. The paralogisms
discussed concern the pretensions to a purely
‘rational’ psychology, that is, one not based
on empirical data. As such, it is built, states
Kant, ‘on the single proposition I think’
(A342=B400).
There are four paralogisms, which are
related to the Table of Categories, though
the table is not approached in its normal
order, since the First Paralogism concerns
substance. Each Paralogism connects the

category to a view about mind so the First
Paralogism states that the mind is a sub-
stance. The other three discuss the quality of
the soul (that it is simple), its quantity (uni-
fied) and its relation (to possible objects in
space). The first edition discusses each of the
paralogisms in great detail while, in the sec-
ond edition, Kant compresses his treatment
greatly and moves much of the discussion
of the fourth Paralogism to an appendix to
the Postulates (in the form of a Refutation
of Idealism). Despite the fascination of this
alteration there is remarkably little discus-
sion of this transformation in the second-
ary literature (with the singular exception of
Karl Ameriks6).
In treating the Paralogisms, Kant first
gives them their form as presented in stand-
ard treatments and later indicates the rea-
son why the argument is given as well as
detecting a fallacious move within them by
which the supporter of the argument hopes
to pass off a formal point as a substantive
one. So the First Paralogism presents the soul
as substance on the basis of the predicative
criterion of substance and then pretends this
establishes the permanence of substance. The
Second Paralogism treats the soul as sim-
ple and hopes thereby to establish that it is
incorporeal. The Third Paralogism is a vari-
ation on the first as here it is hoped to show
that since there is numerical identity at each
point of a mind’s self-consciousness that it
must therefore be permanent. Finally, and
most controversially, the Fourth Paralogism
aims to show that since there is required an
inference to move from the mind to external
objects that the latter are thereby doubtful.
While few commentators have attended in
great detail to the responses Kant makes to
the first three paralogisms, the fourth, which
involves Kant in distinguishing his own
transcendental idealism from the ‘dogmatic’
29
Key Works
idealism of Berkeley and the ‘problematic’
idealism of Descartes, has attracted consider-
able commentary. The revision of this argu-
ment in the second edition has substantially
added to this debate, although there are few
who have pointed to the wealth of Kant’s
earlier and later discussions of idealism.7
The basic distinction Kant seeks to make
here is to the effect that both the forms of
idealism he wishes to distance himself from
are ‘empirical’ while his view of idealism is
‘transcendental’. The thrust of this is that
while Berkeley and Descartes arrive at a
problem with ‘empirical’ objects by testing
them against standards that would be appro-
priate for things in themselves (and thus in
accord with a postulate of transcendental
realism), Kant, by contrast, takes empirical
objects to be ‘real’ in their own terms once
we have affirmed a postulate of ignorance
with regard to things in themselves.
The language of the first edition version
of CPR casts this argument in terms of ‘rep-
resentations’ and this has often been viewed
as creating a problem for Kant’s argument,
one that is suggested by some to have been
removed in the re-cast argument of the sec-
ond edition though others are sceptical as
to whether the argument succeeds at all.
There is considerable misunderstanding of
the argument as is evidenced by Heidegger,
for example, who assumes that Kant here
is attempting to ‘prove’ the existence of the
external world while he is rather aiming to
show instead that we cannot adopt a pos-
tulate of being ‘beyond’ it and always find
ourselves within it.
The Antinomies
After the Paralogisms, Kant turns to the
Antinomies. As the former were concerned
with a supposed ‘rational’ psychology, the
KEY WORKS
latter are interested in the claims of a sup-
posed ‘rational’ cosmology. However, while
paralogisms were merely faulty syllogisms,
antinomies involve competing claims of argu-
ments, both of which appear compelling but
which are mutually incompatible. As with
the Paralogisms, Kant sets these out in rela-
tion to the Table of Categories and, indeed,
the antinomies could be elaborately related
to the discussion of the schematized catego-
ries in the Transcendental Analytic.
All the antinomies are concerned with a
problem about how to complete a series
with two forms of completion competing
with each other. The first kind of completion
involves an infinite regress so that the series
is, in principle, incapable of being completed
while the second, by contrast, finishes with
a first member taken to complete the whole
series. This distinction between two kinds of
completion is then run through each of the
categories so that we see the basis of certain
impossible conflicts. The first, concerning
quantity, is whether the world has a begin-
ning in time or is limited in space, with the
thesis being in favour, the antithesis argu-
ing against. The second, concerning quality,
concerns whether the world is made up of
simple parts, again, with the thesis arguing in
favour, the antithesis against. These first two
antinomies, concerning the world, are ‘math-
ematical’ antinomies as they correspond to
the mathematical principles of the Analytic.
The second two antinomies are ‘dynamical’
with the third concerning relation in terms
of origin with the thesis arguing for an origin
of natural causality in a different causality
of freedom and the antithesis denying this.
Finally, the Fourth Antinomy is an antinomy
of modality and discusses whether nature
depends on something that is a necessary
cause with the thesis arguing in favour and
the antithesis against.
30
There are a number of debates about
the Antinomies, not least the relation they
possess to the principles of the Analytic.
Recently, some writers have suggested,8
in contradiction of established readings,
that the argument of the Third Antinomy
bears no specific connection to the Second
Analogy, a view that depends in its turn on
how the latter is viewed. The Antinomies
have also received uneven treatment as the
Third Antinomy has received much greater
attention than the others. Kant’s general
‘solution’ to the antinomies involves invoca-
tion of the transcendental distinction. Kant
basically suggests that in the cases of the first
two antinomies there is no ground at all for
determining a solution and that the problem
arises by treating appearances as things in
themselves. By contrast, the Third Antinomy
does have a solution since freedom turns out
to be negatively available as something that
is not inconceivable and need not be in con-
flict with the operation of nature. The Fourth
Antinomy reference is, similarly, a possible
one though no determinateness could be
given to any such ‘necessary’ referent.
Kant’s Critique of Theology
The discussion of the Fourth Antinomy is a
preliminary to the following account of the
‘ideal’ of pure reason, which is a reference to
the individuation of an idea (A568=B596).
The transcendental ideal describes some-
thing that is the ‘sum total of all possibility’
(A573=B601) and Kant goes on to discuss
the speculative proofs that have been given
of the existence of this being. This discussion
is one of the most famous parts of CPR and
is certainly one of its most influential. Kant
argues that there are three such proofs: the
ontological, the cosmological and the phys-
ico-theological (or argument from design).

Kant’s objection to the ontological argument
repeats the point already made in OPD that
existence is not a predicate and it is now
added that the argument appears to involve
a petitio principii since it assumes all along
the being whose existence is apparently only
hypothetical. Kant also objects to the view
that there is some special status attached
to propositions concerning the existence
of God, referring to his cardinal distinction
between synthetic and analytic judgments,
showing thereby that the former cannot be
true by definition and that the latter can
introduce no new information.
The cosmological proof apparently
appeals to experience but only in terms of
the most general predications (existence and
causation) but then seeks to ground these on
something necessary where the concept of
the latter is, in fact, surreptitiously borrowed
from the ontological argument. Since causa-
tion cannot be used beyond the level of expe-
rience there is already a different problem
with the argument, an argument that also
confuses logical and transcendental possibil-
ity. Finally, the physico-theological argument
is one that appeals to the notion of purpo-
siveness, a procedure that renders this the
most popular of all the arguments. Unlike the
previous two, it would not, even if successful,
prove a supreme being but only an artificer
of products. Like the cosmological argument
it pretends to rest on empirical grounds but
secretly smuggles in the supreme being as
defined by the ontological argument.
The Regulative Use of Ideas of Reason
After dispatching ‘rational’ theology, Kant
concludes the treatment of the dialectic with
an ‘appendix’ that discusses the positive
use ideas of pure reason can be put to. This
argument was for long much neglected but
31
Key Works
has been the source of some debate in recent
years. The basic point concerning it is that
here Kant denies constitutive employment of
ideas but then introduces a regulative use of
them. This latter is complicated in its deploy-
ment since Kant distinguishes here between
the hypothetical employment of reason and
the transcendental regulative principles of
reason. This distinction is often overlooked
with the effect that considerable confusion
ensues. The former principles describe a
generic form of unity but do not introduce
the criteria for empirical truth that emerges
from the latter and which are essentially
related to a series of principles, foremost
among which are the principles of parsimony,
continuity and specification that had a first
appearance in the ‘principles of harmony’ of
ID. These principles appear to be as neces-
sary for experience as the more famous ones
of the Transcendental Analytic.9
The Doctrine of Method
The final section of CPR, after the closure
of the Doctrine of Elements is the Doctrine
of Method. This part of CPR has been much
overlooked although it contains ‘the formal
conditions of a complete system of pure rea-
son’ (A708=B736). It is divided into four
chapters of very uneven length with the
majority of pages devoted to the ‘discipline’
of pure reason where this concerns not the
content of pure reason, which has already
been dealt with, but only its ‘method’. In the
course of this discussion, Kant elaborates
further his distinction between philosophi-
cal and mathematical method, the distinc-
tion first clearly introduced by him in Inq.
Kant here shows that the exactness of math-
ematics is not attainable by the philosopher
through an examination of definitions, axi-
oms and demonstrations. The necessity for
KEY WORKS
the procedure of critique is further discussed
with Kant making a claim concerning the
‘legal’ status of it that helps to clarify the legal
metaphors with which the work abounds. In
this chapter, Kant also discusses the role of
hypotheses and proofs in philosophy.
The second chapter, on the ‘canon’ of pure
reason, introduces the truncated practical
philosophy of CPR. Here Kant discusses the
ends of reason, in particular in connection
with the questions about the existence of God,
the immortality of the soul and the possibil-
ity of freedom, that he had described, as early
as the introduction, as central to metaphys-
ics. The discussion of morality that follows is
clearly preparatory but already indicates that
its measure cannot be by means of happiness.
The nature of belief is also investigated with
the specific status of it in practical philoso-
phy emphasized.
In the third chapter, Kant discusses the
‘architectonic’ of reason or the need of it to
form a system. This discussion is a remarka-
ble one as it compares the activity of system-
atization to the growth of an animal body
and Kant introduces here a form of schema
which has received little commentary but
which I would term a ‘final end schema’. In
the course of expounding it, Kant indicates
the basis of the historicity of science which
must begin with an idea to organize all its
enquiry but which that enquiry will alter
in the course of its execution. This altera-
tion in the course of exposition for science
is related to the need of philosophical sys-
tematization. Philosophy is now described
as ‘the science of the relation of all cogni-
tion to the essential ends of human reason’
(A839=B867), which ensures that it has to
be understood as something that has never
been realized (to be an idea). Metaphysics is
subsequently determined as that part of phi-
losophy which ‘is to present that cognition
32
in this systematic unity’ (A845=B873). It
has the end of wisdom and it seeks it by
the means of science. Kant here promises a
metaphysics of morals and metaphysics of
nature on the basis of CPR.
The final chapter of this section and of the
whole work concerns the ‘history’ of pure
reason and Kant here distinguishes between
three types of history, one concerned with the
‘object’ of previous philosophical enquiry, one
with its mode of cognizing and one in respect
of method. In the first sense, the key contrast
in philosophy has been between ‘sensualists’
such as Epicurus and ‘intellectualists’ such as
Plato. In the second sense, the key contrast
has been between those who derive cognition
from experience, such as Aristotle or those
who derive cognition from intelligible princi-
ples, such as Plato. The third contrast is drawn
between ‘naturalists’ and ‘scientists’ with the
former condemned as naïve in their attempt
to proceed without the method of science
from the senses alone and the latter divided
between dogmatists (such as Wolff), sceptics
(such as Hume) and critics (Kant himself).
PROLEGOMENA TO ANY FUTURE
METAPHYSICS THAT WILL BE ABLE
TO COME FORWARD AS SCIENCE (P)
This work was published in 1783, two years
after the publication of the first edition of CPR
and very much as a consequence of it. The ini-
tial reception of CPR was not favourable with
the notorious Garve-Feder review particularly
outraging Kant and effectively leading to him
writing P. This is made clear by the ‘Appendix’
to this work where Kant attacks the review at
some length making especially clear his dis-
pleasure at the comparison of the Critique to
the work of Berkeley (P 372–380). The other

element of the review and the general recep-
tion of CPR that annoyed and surprised Kant
was the attack on its style and lack of popular-
ity. In response, in the ‘Preface’ to this work,
Kant attacks the ‘common sense’ philosophy
but proceeds to present P as a popular pres-
entation of the main doctrines of CPR. Also in
this ‘Preface’, Kant makes the famous remark
about having been awoken from his ‘dogmatic
slumbers’ by remembering Hume’s ‘problem’
with the notion of causality, a ‘problem’ Kant
here specifically states to concern the origin of
the concept.
The Method of the ‘Prolegomena’
The ‘Preamble’ that follows the ‘Preface’ is
where Kant makes clearer both the specific
method of P and the difficulties of metaphys-
ics that have occasioned his general critical
work. It is here that Kant first makes manifest
his emphasis on metaphysics attaining a ‘sci-
entific’ form as becomes key to the treatment
of the second edition of CPR. Kant proceeds
to distinguish between analytic and synthetic
judgments and to make the principle of con-
tradiction key to the former though, in his
discussion of the syntheticity of mathematics,
he has to point out that synthetic judgments
might accord with the principle of contradic-
tion without being generated by it.
Kant goes on to present the method of
P to be an ‘analytic’ one in contrast to the
‘synthetic’ method of CPR but, again, distin-
guishes this method from the sense of ‘ana-
lytic’ at work in analytic judgments. In the
case of the ‘analytic’ method, we begin by
treating something as given and then work
out the conditions under which it is possible
for it to be given. So the general question of
synthetic a priori judgments is now treated
in relation to certain cognitions of pure rea-
son that are already given. The subsequent
33
Key Works
division of the work is four-fold in accord-
ance with the four elements treated as so
given which concern pure mathematics, pure
natural science and a two-fold inquiry into
metaphysics, namely, first ‘in general’ and,
secondly, ‘as a science’.
Pure Mathematics
The treatment of ‘pure mathematics’ aims to
show that its possibility depends on its reliance
on pure intuitions which concern only the form
of sensibility. So, pure mathematics depends on
the pre-given intuitions of space and time. In
responding to the general objection that space
and time are qualities of things in themselves,
Kant introduces the argument from incon-
gruent counterparts, an argument not used in
CPR but which he had previously used, to very
different effect in his early essay on regions of
space (DS). Kant also points out that treating
geometry as dependent on the pure intuition
of space resolves the ‘problem’ of its applica-
tion to space and rejects the confusion of his
transcendental idealism with the idealism of
Berkeley, even suggesting a new title for his
own idealism, namely, ‘critical’ idealism.
Pure Natural Science
The treatment of pure natural science identi-
fies ‘pure natural science’ as concerned with
universal laws of nature, which are completely
a priori. So, in this section, Kant treats the
universal conditions of the possibility of expe-
rience, or, put another way, rehearses several
of the central doctrines of the Transcendental
Analytic of CPR. In the course of doing so,
Kant introduces a novel and controversial
distinction between judgments of perception
and judgments of experience. The distinction
is intended to correspond to the positive and
negative uses of ‘experience’ in CPR itself
KEY WORKS
with judgments of perception being the kind
of judgments that arise purely from a relation
to the sensory manifold in contradistinction
to the principles that enable cognizance of the
manifold, which latter are termed judgments
of experience.
The distinction has caused some contro-
versy and confusion10 since Kant includes
the notion that there are some judgments of
perception that are intrinsically incapable of
becoming judgments of experience due to their
ineliminable subjectivity. However the distinc-
tion in general is less novel than many have
claimed and is preliminary to a restatement
of the derivation of the Table of Categories
from the Table of Judgment as in CPR. The
main point of it appears to be a critical one,
to the effect that judgments of perception are
incapable, by themselves alone, of leading to
justification of the universal laws that are nec-
essary if there is to be a ‘pure natural science’.
Kant proceeds to give, in very summary form,
a statement of the central principles of CPR
including his response to Hume’s doubt con-
cerning causality, which is treated as arising by
trying to find something in experience that is in
fact a necessary condition for experience (P 313).
Metaphysics
The treatment of the general possibility of
metaphysics reprises many of the key argu-
ments of the Transcendental Dialectic of
CPR. In discussing the pure rational concepts
or ideas, Kant refers to the treatment of them
as constituting the ‘essential end’ of meta-
physics and again discusses the ideas as aris-
ing from a need for completeness. Treatments
of the Paralogisms, the Antinomies and the
Transcendental Ideal all follow with the first
of these given in a compressed form that
anticipates the briefer account of the sec-
ond edition of CPR. The antinomies are also
34
described as a device for rousing philosophy
‘from its dogmatic slumber’, a less famous
use of this phrase. Kant’s treatment of the
positive regulative use of ideas is here very
compressed.
At this point, the divisions in the treatment
of the material become more confusing since a
‘conclusion’ is inserted prior to the discussion
of the possibility of metaphysics as a science
and this ‘conclusion’ concerns the ‘bounds’
of pure reason. Here Kant includes remarks
on Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion as part of his distinction between
‘limits’ and ‘bounds’. Mathematics and nat-
ural science are said to have ‘limits’ but not
bounds where limit indicates that there is
something beyond their inquiries but ‘bounds’
would be something internal to them that cur-
tailed their means of operation. If mathemat-
ics and natural science have such limits but not
bounds, the case is different with metaphysics
as the latter does have ‘bounds’ and these are
revealed in the antinomies. In the course of
making this argument, Kant suggests ways in
which Hume’s scepticism could be avoided
without making dogmatic assertions through
an appeal to an analogical use of reason. In
the course of making this point, Kant suggests
that the transcendental ideas help to lead us
past pure naturalism but he here really points
forwards to practical philosophy. The ‘solu-
tion’ of the question concerning the possibility
of metaphysics as a science is revealed to be
that it must first be subjected to critique.
THE GROUNDWORK FOR THE
METAPHYSICS OF MORALS (G)
Published in 1785, this is the first work
exclusively devoted to practical philosophy
in the Critical period. It is also the single most

influential contribution Kant made to moral
philosophy. The point of it is clearly demar-
cated in the ‘Preface’ where Kant makes clear
the need for a pure moral philosophy that is
cleansed of all reference to the empirical and
hence does not depend on anthropological
data. The argument supporting the need for
such an enquiry consists in the claim that all
moral philosophy generally rests upon the
pure element. The reason supporting this
view is that there exists a moral law and the
nature of this moral law will itself be dem-
onstrated by means of a pure enquiry. This
work is, however, specifically and clearly
stated by Kant, not merely in its title but also
in the argument of the ‘Preface’ to provide
only a preliminary work on the foundations
of the metaphysics of morals and not to give
the metaphysics in question itself. In order
to provide this foundation, there is only one
task the work is devoted to and this is seek-
ing out and establishing the supreme princi-
ple of morality (G 392). The application of
this principle to a system of ethics is deferred
though this has not prevented many readers
of this work from trying to discern it here.
Philosophical Method in the ‘Groundwork’
The work is divided into three parts, each of
which signals a ‘transition’ from one type of
claim to another and Kant indicates that the
work has a double type of method since ini-
tially he will proceed ‘analytically’ from ordi-
nary moral claims to a determination of the
supreme principle of morality and then work
back ‘synthetically’ from an examination
both of the principle itself and its sources
to ordinary moral claims ‘in which we find
it used’ (G 392). Surprisingly little has been
made of this dual methodology, and where
it has been commented on it has tended to
be assumed that Kant is using the terms
35
Key Works
‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’ in the manner in
which they work with regard to judgments,
rather than methods of exposition as sug-
gested in P.
There is, in fact, something of a combina-
tion of uses in Kant’s reference here to ‘ana-
lytic’ and ‘synthetic’ since, on the one hand,
he will show how certain kinds of connec-
tions are ‘analytic’ in the meaning of ‘ana-
lytic judgments’ while, on the other, he will
develop his exposition after first an ‘analytic’
and then a ‘synthetic’ method. The distinc-
tion between these methods, as made in P,
is that an ‘analytic’ method assumes some-
thing as given and then demonstrates the
conditions under which it is given while a
‘synthetic’ method, by contrast, attempts to
build something up by means of reference to
its first conditions. As will become apparent,
the first two sections of G operate accord-
ing to an ‘analytic’ method, in addition to
demonstrating ‘analytic’ types of connection
in judgments while the third section operates
in a ‘synthetic’ way to show the basis of a
‘synthetic’ judgment.
The First Part of the ‘Groundwork’
The first part of the work heralds a ‘transi-
tion’ from ordinary rational moral claims to
philosophical ones. It begins with a famous
discussion of the ‘good will’, which is hailed
as that which is good without qualification or
is an unconditional good. It is suggested that
ordinary reason admits this notion, a point
that Kant derives from his analysis of this
ordinary reason (thus operating analytically
with regard to ordinary reason). This is done
by connecting the ‘good will’ to duty where it
is shown that acting in accord with the good
will requires no reference to inclination, and
it is later suggested that actions done from
duty have their work in the maxim according
KEY WORKS
to which they are determined. Reference to
the ‘necessity’ of acting out of respect for the
law is also introduced but this notion is not
here clearly defined since ‘moral worth’ is
clearly stated not to follow from any effect
expected from an action.
Kant does here arrive at an initial statement
of the categorical imperative (G 402) as the
law that arises when reference to expected
effects is removed from the will. An initial
example is also introduced to illustrate what
it means to act in accord with such a law with
the case of promising introduced (G  402–
403). Kant admits, however, that while he
takes himself to have analytically derived this
law from ordinary rational moral claims, ordi-
nary reason does not think this law abstractly
in its universal form. Further, Kant suggests
that the problem for ordinary moral claims is
that it is possible to be led astray from this
implicit universality as it is led into a ‘natural
dialectic’ with the demands of inclination. In
order to escape this dialectic, such reason is
led to practical philosophy, not on speculative
grounds, but on practical ones.
The Argument of ‘Groundwork II’
The second section begins from the type of
philosophy that ordinary practical claims are
led to, namely ‘popular’ moral philosophy,
and seeks to show how, analytically, there is
a need to move from such grounds towards
a metaphysics of morals. In opening this
section, Kant states that while the purpose
of the first part had been to show that ordi-
nary use of practical reason was sufficient to
demonstrate that there is a moral law, that
it does not thereby follow that this law was
derived from ‘experience’. In showing that
this is the case, Kant points out that there are
many complaints to the effect that there is no
basis, in reference to experience, for thinking
36
that there even exists such a moral law as he
discovered in the first section. In addition, if
there is a moral law, such a law could not,
in any case, apply only to human beings but
must, instead, apply to all rational beings.
Kant also adds a word of caution concerning
examples since he points out that morality
cannot be derived from them.
In discussing ‘popular moral philosophy’,
Kant clearly has in view the claims of ‘com-
mon sense’ as articulated by philosophers
of the day as he similarly did when argu-
ing against it in P. Such ‘common sense’ it
is now suggested cannot arrive at purity of
insight in moral matters but must eclecti-
cally ground its principles on a number of
sources. In opposition to this tendency, Kant
affirms again the need for a method of iso-
lation that will permit the exposition of a
metaphysics of morals unmixed with anthro-
pology (or theology or anything else). After
making this declaration, Kant proceeds to
make the argument for moving towards such
a pure enquiry. In doing so, Kant examines
the structure of moral claims and describes
them as imperatives that describe something
as good to do. Having made this point, Kant
proceeds to distinguish between hypothetical
and categorical imperatives where the first
sort indicates that something is good for a
purpose that is either possible or actual. Such
imperatives are distinct from categorical ones
as the latter claim something to be necessary
without reference to any further end.
The discussion of hypothetical imperatives
is divided into two kinds with the point made
that everything technical is accomplished by
describing something as possible with regard
to the adoption of certain ends. These types
of hypothetical imperatives are termed by
Kant ‘imperatives of skill’ and have a prob-
lematic modality according to the Table of
Categories of CPR. By contrast, if we assume

happiness as an actual end (even if we do not
know in what this consists), then the adop-
tion of means to it gives us imperatives of
prudence which have an assertoric modality.
Finally, the categorical imperative commands
something without reference to any further
purpose and is the imperative of morality
whose modality is one of necessity.
After describing these kinds of impera-
tive, Kant enquires after their possibility
and describes the two forms of hypothetical
imperative as involving analytical connec-
tions between means and end. By contrast,
the categorical imperative involves a syn-
thetic connection as the willing of action is
connected immediately with the will of a
rational being even though there is no ana-
lytic relation between the two elements.
Hence, the problem of the possibility of the
categorical imperative concerns how a prac-
tical imperative can take the form of a syn-
thetic a priori connection. Having raised this
problem, Kant proceeds to defer its solution
and to concentrate instead on the question of
whether there is not a different kind of ana-
lytic connection in the categorical impera-
tive. This is a connection between the mere
concept of the categorical imperative and the
formula of such an imperative. This cannot
exist for a hypothetical imperative as the end
must be given before we know in what it
consists. But since the categorical imperative
contains no reference to an end other than
the one involved in its own formulation there
is, Kant suggests, an ‘immediate’ connection
between thinking it and cognizing what it
must state. In the thought of the law stated
in such an imperative we have the conception
that maxims must accord with it necessarily
and no restriction on the condition of the
law. If the law is unrestricted, however, this
is as much as to say that it must be given as
universal. This leads Kant to formulate the
37
Key Works
categorical imperative quite simply as a for-
mula of universal law (G 421).
Despite Kant’s claim for the formula of uni-
versal law there is considerable controversy
in the interpretation of this section concern-
ing formulas of the categorical imperative
with Herbert Paton classically claiming that
Kant gives five formulas of it while others
have been content to find only three.11 The
solution to this question is found by look-
ing at Kant’s method of procedure after stat-
ing the categorical imperative as a formula
of universal law. After stating this Kant adds
that all imperatives of duty (specific moral
claims) can be derived from the categorical
imperative as this will tell us the principle
of all such duties. However, prior to giving
his first set of ‘examples’ of application of
the law, Kant first follows the procedure of
CPR and treats the formula of universal law
as he there treated the categories. That is,
Kant proceeds to schematize the categorical
imperative by connecting it to the conditions
under which causal connections are gener-
ally given. These were determined in CPR
as essential for arriving at the conception
of ‘nature’ or a whole of universal laws and
Kant now takes this conception of ‘nature’
and reformulates the formula of the categori-
cal imperative in order to arrive at what he
terms a ‘universal imperative of duty’. This
latter is stated as the view that we should act
as if the maxim of our action were to become
through our will a universal law of nature
(an interestingly regulative statement of law).
It is only after so re-formulating the categori-
cal imperative that examples are then given
in order to test it.
The examples are said to be taken from
the ‘usual division’ of duties into duties to
ourselves and others and perfect and imper-
fect duties though these divisions are not here
explained or accounted for. The examples
KEY WORKS
are divided into two classes as the first two,
concerned with suicide and (once again)
promising involve cases where to take a cer-
tain maxim as giving the rule to ‘a system of
nature’ would produce a direct contradiction
into such a system.
The second two examples, concerned with
the cultivation of talents and beneficence, do
not produce such a direct contradiction into
the ‘system of nature’ but the reasons for not
adopting certain maxims now are stated to
instead reside in a contradiction in willing
certain types of end universally. This division
is complex and controversial though Kant’s
general point is stated simply as requiring
consistency in willing with reference to the
standpoint of reason.
After having examined these points, Kant
confesses that he has not as yet shown that
the categorical imperative really exists. In
order to press further on with his enquiry,
Kant now assesses the question of whether
it is necessary for all rational beings to
judge actions according to maxims in such
a way that the maxims in question serve as
universal laws. Such a law, if it exists, would
have to have an a priori connection with
the concept of the will of rational beings.
In order to discover the connection between
the law and the will, however, Kant moves
decisively into the terrain of the metaphys-
ics of morals.
As with his earlier discussion of types of
imperatives, Kant now discusses types of
motivation of the will, discarding empiri-
cal motivations and looking for objective
laws and describing ends as either ‘sub-
jective’ in being based on inclination or
‘objective’ in being based on something
that would be valid for all rational beings.
Having made this distinction, Kant also
points to the ground of subjective princi-
ples as requiring a matter of a certain kind
38
(just as hypothetical imperatives required a
certain pre-given end). By contrast, objec-
tive principles would be formal only, not
requiring a pre-given matter to be given to
them. Similarly, ends which require a certain
matter to be given are relative to those ends
and take their worth only from the worth of
the ends in question. By contrast, if there is
something whose worth is not relative but
absolute then it would provide the ground
of the categorical rather than merely hypo-
thetical imperative.
That which is taken to have such an abso-
lute worth by Kant is the existence of rational
beings themselves precisely because, in their
possession of reason, they possess something
which does not have a merely relative worth
but is rather the ground of all else having
worth. So the rational being is an end-in-
itself and not merely a means to something
else. This leads to Kant formulating what
he terms the ‘practical imperative’, which is
generally known as the formula of humanity
and from which he states all laws of the will
must be able to be derived. It follows from
this claim that it should coincide in applica-
tion with the schematized formula of uni-
versal law and the same four examples are
used as were given for the previous formula.
One difference in the application of this for-
mula is that while the first two examples are
treated as conflicting with the end of human-
ity directly, the second two forms are argued
only ‘not to harmonize’ with it. This distinc-
tion has, somewhat surprisingly, drawn sig-
nificantly less attention than the division in
the treatment of duties arising from the sche-
matized formula of universal law.
After stating the formula of humanity and
describing the examples in relation to it, Kant
goes on to discuss the distinction between
them is that the first formula gave the rule
according to universality and then describe

the means of rendering it as a law (through
reference to the type of nature) while the sec-
ond, by contrast, describes the subject of all
ends in the form of an end-in-itself. The third
principle is then described as a combination
of the first two, namely, a rational being that
wills universal law and by this means Kant
arrives at the notion of the autonomy of the
will, which is contrasted with principles of
heteronomy. The total vision of beings gener-
ally acting in accord with the law provides
us with the image of a ‘kingdom of ends’
where each rational being is sovereign and
all laws derive from the same single source
of reason.
Kant schematically presents maxims as
having a form, which is universal, a matter,
which is an end and a complete determina-
tion in the notion of the kingdom of ends
where this latter is clearly an analogue to
the transcendental ideas discussed in CPR.
Having reached this point, Kant can now
descend back to the notion with which he
began the first section, the notion of the
‘good will’ and describe the good will as that
which takes maxims whose universality are
willable as the ground of its laws. However,
this section closes with the question arising
again of how the synthetic practical a priori
proposition whose content has been thus
uncovered is itself possible.
The Argument of ‘Groundwork III’
The third and final section of the work has
been one of the most controversial parts with
wide misunderstanding of its argument and
rejection of its results. Here Kant makes the
last ‘transition’, this time from a metaphys-
ics of morals to a critique of pure practical
reason. The section opens where the previous
section closed, with the notion of the will but
examines it now in terms of its causality. In
39
Key Works
accord with CPR, Kant describes freedom as
a spontaneous causality and connects such a
notion to the categorical imperative.
Kant confesses a certain circularity of rea-
soning in getting the categorical imperative
supported by freedom as freedom is a recip-
rocal idea with autonomy and thus not able
to support it. In response, Kant develops the
notion that we look at ourselves from two
different points of view on the basis of the
distinction between appearances and things
in themselves. Reason, as a pure form of
spontaneity, as is expressed in its formation
of ideas, appears to go well beyond anything
offered to the mind by sensibility. In looking
at our power of reason, we view ourselves
from the standpoint of intelligence rather
than that of sensibility. So when we think of
ourselves as free we look at ourselves on the
pattern of our reason and it is also from this
that we arrive at the notion of autonomy.
The synthetic a priori proposition that is
the categorical imperative is based on con-
necting the will, viewed as something capa-
ble of being affected, with the idea of the will
as something intelligible with the sense that
the latter can determine the former through
reason. The law is hence something like a cat-
egory of reason which may well explain the
process of schematization of it in accord with
the general idea of unity taken from under-
standing (nature). The world into which we
move when we think reason, the intelligible
world, is not one that can be thought in any
way except through the nature of its formal
adherence to law, so we cannot explain how
it is possible that pure reason can be practi-
cal. The intelligible world is rather only what
remains when we have excluded from moti-
vation all that comes from the law of sense.
Kant closes the work with a confession of
the impossibility of seeking further for the
ground of possibility of morality.
KEY WORKS
METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS OF
NATURAL SCIENCE (MFNS)
This work was published in 1786, a year prior
to the second edition of CPR and there are
many respects in which its writing appears
related to the re-drafting of the Analytic of
Principles of CPR and also to indicate, along
with P, the emphasis that emerges in the sec-
ond edition of CPR on the notion of meta-
physics as a ‘science’. Of all the key works of
the Critical period, it has received least atten-
tion though the attention it has been paid has
tended to be lively with Gerd Buchdahl and
Michael Friedman presenting sharply differ-
ent interpretations of the import of the prin-
ciples provided in this book.12 It is divided
into four parts, each of which accords both
with the Table of Categories of CPR and
with the Analytic of Principles that schema-
tized the table.
In the ‘Preface’, Kant begins by discuss-
ing the term ‘nature’, distinguishing between
the sense of it applied when we speak of
the ‘nature’ of a thing, which he describes
as its ‘internal principle’ or essence and the
term when it is used to describe the total-
ity of objects of experience. The latter could
further be sub-divided between ‘body’ and
‘soul’. After making these points concerning
‘nature’, Kant turns next to the discussion of
‘science’, describing it as ‘a whole of cognition
ordered according to principles’ (MFNS 467).
For there to be a ‘science’ of nature it would
have to be the case that cognition of it would
be a rational one concerned with coherence.
However, and more importantly, the notion
of natural science is also presented by Kant
as having two possible forms, one concerned
with a priori principles and the other with
‘laws of experience’ and he is firm in declar-
ing that only the former is truly ‘science’ as
only it can attain apodeictic certainty.
40
On the basis of this point concerning a pri-
ori principles, Kant denies that chemistry is a
‘true’ science. ‘Nature’ is also understood to
involve a reference to necessary laws, which
relates the notion to the sense of ‘science’
given. The work is an extended investigation
into ‘pure natural science’, the possibility of
which had been a subject of investigation in
the second part of P. Unlike in CPR where
Kant looked at the laws that make possible
nature in general, here we are focused on a
‘special’ nature. In order to look at this ‘spe-
cial’ nature, we require an empirical concept
to be given to us, which, in this case, is the
concept of ‘matter’. In order to undertake
a ‘special’ doctrine of nature, however, we
must grasp the concept of the ‘science’ of
this nature in terms of mathematics. The
reason for this is that we are dealing, in the
case of this ‘special’ science, with determi-
nate natural things and to do that we cannot
proceed with concepts alone but also require
a priori intuitions (as was detailed in the dis-
cussion of pure natural science in P). These
latter, to give us a sense of something deter-
minate, have to be rendered in the form of
mathematics. It is precisely the impossibility
of rendering the claims of chemistry in such
mathematical form that leads Kant to dis-
qualify its attempt to be termed a ‘science’
(P 471) though it is arguable that chemistry
attained this status around the time Kant
published this work. More importantly than
the status of chemistry is the inability of dis-
cussions of the mind being viewed by Kant
as ‘scientific’ since, with the mind, there is
no necessary reference to external intuition.
So Kant’s view of what counts as a ‘science’
is certainly more restrictive than standards
that have since tended to be applied though
its significance as a standard is that it allows
a clear sense to be given of what is meant
by a division of ‘science’ between ‘pure’ and

‘applied’, a division that other accounts
often cannot meet so well.
The investigation of a pure doctrine of
body thus emerges as the province of the work
with this notion based on an analysis of ‘the
concept of a matter in general’ (MFNS 472).
This notion of ‘matter’ is itself taken from
experience but it is now isolated in relation
to pure intuition and this method of isolation
enables Kant to produce a metaphysics of cor-
poreal nature. In referring to the dependence
of his exposition on the Table of Categories,
Kant also adds a famous footnote promising
a recasting of the Transcendental Deduction
on the basis of ‘a single conclusion from the
precisely determined definition of a judgment
in general’ (MFNS 475–476n.), which points
again to the second edition of CPR. However,
in relation to the application of this table to
the concept of matter, Kant next argues that
matter must be seen in motion as only thereby
are the senses affected. So natural science is
now concisely defined as ‘either a pure or an
applied doctrine of motion’ (MFNS 477) with
this work providing the former. Effectively,
in introducing the notion of motion in this
way, Kant immediately schematizes the bare
concept of matter and does so in accord with
the programme of mechanist philosophers at
least as early as Descartes. The four headings
of the work relate matter in motion to the
four titles of the Table of the Categories.
The Foundations of Phoronomy
The first part, phoronomy, relates motion to
pure quantity without consideration of qual-
ity and corresponds to the treatment of the
Axioms of Intuition in CPR. Matter, under-
stood as movable, requires reference to space
as space is the intuitive basis of the claim of
movement. Kant opens the discussion, how-
ever, by distinguishing between the space in
41
Key Works
which such movement can be grasped and
the basis of thinking movement as such
which requires a distinction between rela-
tive and absolute space. The space in which
all movement is given requires reference to a
space that can be thought as enabling move-
ment to be given and this latter would not
itself be movable but would be absolute and
hence an object of thought, not of intuition.
Movement, understood in abstraction
from quality, is something purely external
and is hence equivalent to a point which can
have velocity and direction. Space in which
there is movement must itself be capable also
of movement in order to be sensed as other-
wise our senses would not be affected by it.
Further, there is the distinction of levels of
movement where something is seen moving
in relation to something else of similar scale
but to be at rest relative to something of a
different scale and this requires a distinction
of spaces that are given in movement. So we
assume absolute space as a fixed reference
point for all the movable spaces though such
absolute space is not itself an ‘object’ but
only a ‘logical’ universal (MFNS 482).
Motion involves changes of external rela-
tions though, Kant suggests, it is only with
points that we can truly say that motion is
always a change of place as larger bodies
can move without changing place or change
place without moving. Kant also uses the dis-
cussion of incongruent counterparts that was
mentioned in P to illustrate what is meant by
the claim that with some different motions
the only distinction is ‘internal’ without hav-
ing recourse to any concepts of quality. In the
case of two circular motions that differ only
in direction we have incongruent counter-
parts and the difference here is not concep-
tual but only intuitive.
Kant next provides a purely phoronomic
sense of permanence as rest or endurance
KEY WORKS
(MFNS 485). As with the discussion of move-
ment, so also the account of rest has to typi-
cally revise the naïve sense given to the term
since rest, if interpreted as lack of motion, will
not be capable of being intuitively constructed
and so, in place of it, Kant substitutes the
sense of a motion ‘with infinitely small speed
throughout a finite time’ (MFNS 486).
After making these points, which do not
immediately require a sense of motion being
produced by relations between points, Kant
turns to the more difficult case, which he
terms ‘composite motion’ (MFNS 486), where
we intuitively present a movement as arising
from the effect of two conjoint movements
being united. Since we are only dealing with
movement as quantitative alone we cannot, in
consideration of this conception, include as yet
any reference to forces. So motion, in a general
sense, when we are at the level of phoronomy,
is equivalent to the description of a space.
However, this is distinct from a merely geo-
metrical consideration as we refer not merely
to the space but also to the time and velocity
with which the point describes the space.
Cartesian investigation of motion was hence
entirely carried out at the level of phoronomy.
In accounting for composition of motions at
this level, we merely reduce them to condi-
tions under which a motion is compounded
from two others and built up from there. Two
motions can be considered in one of three pos-
sibilities: either as in the same direction; in
opposite directions; or in an angle. These three
possibilities are subsequently constructed
in intuition by Kant and then related to the
three moments of quantity from the Table of
Judgment of CPR.
The Foundations of Dynamics
The second chapter of the work concerns
dynamics where Kant considers the movable
42
insofar as it fills a space, that is, in relation to
quality, which corresponds to the treatment
of sensation in the Anticipations of Perception
of CPR. Filling a space involves resistance
to other parts of matter that ‘strive’ to fill the
space in which the current matter is present.
This dynamical sense of matter is based upon
the phoronomic one but, in its reference to a
capacity of resistance, builds in a further feature
that could not be considered at the level of pho-
ronomy alone. The ‘resistance’ in question at
the level of dynamics is still restricted since we
work here not with the notion of a resistance
persisting after movement has taken place but
rather only the resistance that would prevent
diminution of the extension of matter in space.
The filling of space does not take place just
due to the existence of matter since, on that
basis alone, we would only have phoronomic
considerations. Rather, what is required for
such filling to take place is a special moving
force. If matter enters a space, it does so by
moving but resistance to such entry dimin-
ishes movement or even requires rest. But
the only thing capable of resisting movement
would itself be movement and this requires
that such latter movement must itself be forc-
ing the first movement. So matter fills space
by means of moving force. In making this
claim, Kant opposes the view of Lambert
(and Locke) that the principle by which space
is filled is solidity. The problem with viewing
the property of filling space as being merely
solidity is that it seems to imply that there is
something conceptually involved in matter
being resistant, a view Kant ridicules by say-
ing that the concept of contradiction does not
force matter back. In other words, we have to
include in the conception of matter something
that enables repulsion to take place before we
could claim that there was a contradiction
involved in non-resistant matter. We cannot
just postulate this force in matter: we have to

intuitively demonstrate its existence, not sim-
ply attempt to derive it from a concept.
Having opened with this point, Kant goes
on to distinguish between attractive and
repulsive force, with the former being a mov-
ing force of matter that leads other matter
to be drawn towards it. The latter force, by
contrast, leads other matter to retreat from
the vicinity. All extension into space has a
degree, however, and can be envisioned as
greater or smaller to an infinite degree.
The filling of space occurs through the
expansion of matter and such expansion is
also termed by Kant ‘elasticity’ and is an origi-
nal property of matter that cannot be derived
from anything else. Although matter can be
compressed to infinity, therefore, it cannot be
penetrated by any other matter as this would
require an infinitely compressive force which
is impossible. The sense of impenetrability
involved is relative to the degree of compres-
sion while an absolute notion of impenetra-
bility would not permit compression at all
without positing empty space within matter.
The mathematical notion of impenetrability
does not reach the notion of physical proper-
ties while the dynamical one determines the
possibility of extension existing at all and the
means by which it can be diminished.
The dynamical conception of substance is
that it is that in space which, without refer-
ence to anything existing outside it in space,
is nonetheless movable. Kant also postulates
the infinite divisibility of matter with all the
parts of matter being themselves forms of mat-
ter and not of something else. In making this
claim, Kant repudiates the position he adopted
in PhM where he had denied the infinite divis-
ibility of matter and he here replies to his own
earlier argument (MFNS 504–508). Kant now
points out that infinite divisibility of matter,
while not following from the infinite divisibility
of space, does follow if we assume all parts of
43
Key Works
space are filled with matter and adopt the addi-
tional assumption that matter cannot be broken
down into something that is not matter. We can
see this in the following way. If space is filled
with matter and matter cannot be broken down
into something that is not matter then, in filling
all the parts of space, it has to fill all the parts
of its division. In filling all the parts of the divi-
sion it also indicates that a force of resistance
belongs to each part of matter. However, due to
the transcendental distinction between appear-
ances and things in themselves, we cannot say
that it therefore follows that there is actual
divisibility to infinity since we deal only with
appearances and do not have an actual division
to work with. Further division is indefinite and
possible only and belongs only to appearances
without in itself being able to lead us to reject
the notion of monads. However, the monads are
not available physically but only intelligibly.
Kant moves on to argue specifically for the
need of the notion of attractive force as part
of matter. Impenetrability has been shown to
make extension possible but not only does it
do this but it also allows the continued expan-
sion of matter. If impenetrability were matter’s
only force, then there would be no bounds to
the extension of any given part of matter so we
would be unable to assign any particular quan-
tity of it to any assignable space. Due to this, we
require the notion of a force that is opposed to
the extensive one, a force that compresses mat-
ter and hence operates against repulsion, which
would be to operate in a way that was attrac-
tive. However, attractive force likewise could not
exist alone as its effect is only to compress and
if it existed alone the universe would shrink to a
single point. The nature of attraction in matter
is that it acts as an immediate action ‘through
empty space’ of one matter upon another.
In addressing this point, Kant attempts to
answer the basis of attractive force by means
of metaphysics, a basis Newton sought to
KEY WORKS
avoid addressing by an allegedly instrumen-
talist use of mathematical notions. The means
by which Kant addresses this is through refer-
ence to the original conditions of attraction.
Attraction must precede any given specific
contact of matter and be independent of such
contact since it renders it possible. But if it
is independent of such contact in its original
operation then it is independent of the filling
of space between the two moved matters so it
must take place originally without the spaces
all needing to be filled and hence by means of
empty space. So attraction is originally action
at a distance. Attractive force can be no further
explained than this since it is an original force
that cannot be derived from anything else.
However, Kant’s argument shows a basis for
contact and further demonstrates that contact
alone is merely a cessation of motion and so
cannot be the basis of attraction. The original
attractive force is also argued to extend itself
through the whole universe to infinity.
In his ‘general observation’ on dynamics,
Kant adds a basis for thinking of space as
now filled throughout in opposition to the
contemporary deployment of ‘empty space’,
repeating here an argument first used in CPR
(A173–175=B215–217), here adding that
‘empty space’ is now only a hypothesis and
not a principle. After making this point, Kant
moves on to contrast two ways of respond-
ing to nature, the ‘mathematico-mechanical’
and the ‘metaphysical-dynamical’, pointing
out that the former requires the notion of
absolute impenetrability, which he has shown
to be false and that with its interpolation of
empty space into the interior of matter it
allows the imagination inordinate freedom.
The Foundation of Mechanics
The third chapter concerns mechanics and
here we arrive at the notion of ‘moving
44
force’ or the communication of motion from
one part of matter to another. For this to
be thought requires that the teachings of
dynamics have first been given. It is at this
point that Kant can introduce, for the first
time, the grounded determinate notion of
‘body’ as a mass of determinate shape. The
first point made here is that the quantity of
matter can be estimated only by a quantity of
motion at a given velocity, a view that leads
him to officially repudiate the conception of
‘living forces’ with which he began his philo-
sophical career, adopting now the view that
the forces of dynamics are ‘dead’ forces and
that if ‘living’ forces are to be spoken of this
can only be by means of mechanics.
Kant next goes on to state the three laws
of mechanics in turn, starting with the con-
servation principle that the quantity of matter
stays constant (which affects the restatement
of the First Analogy in the second edition for-
mulation in CPR). The substance dealt with in
mechanics is that of matter and the conserva-
tion principle gives us the mechanical formula
for substance. In remarking on this point,
Kant points to the difference between speak-
ing of substance in spatial terms as opposed to
attempting to apply it to non-spatial ones, as
in the latter case there is no contradiction in
something fading away (a point used against
Moses Mendelssohn at B414–415).
The second law of mechanics is the prin-
ciple of inertia that each body stays in the
same state unless something external brings
about a change in it, which is rendered in
general as the claim that we require external
causes for matter to change, the first specific
and direct reference to ‘causes’ in the whole
work. Kant here refers to the proof of the
Second Analogy and determines its generic
principle in relation to matter which brings
in external relations of space. Kant denies
that the claim concerning actions having

equal and opposite reactions states a genuine
law of inertia as it does not tell us what mat-
ter is prevented from doing, and to posit the
law of inertia in a positive form suggests that
matter is endowed with positive striving to
conserve its state. To do the latter is to move
towards the view that matter contains life,
the view Kant calls ‘hylozoism’ and which he
terms ‘the death of all natural philosophy’
(MFNS 544).
The third law of mechanics is then stated as
the rule concerning action and reaction being
always equal in communication of motion. As
with the previous two laws so with this one
Kant refers first to the generic principle taken
from CPR, namely, in this case, the Third
Analogy. The main point now is to show
that reciprocal action is best understood as
reaction. This is shown by building on the
arguments given so far in mechanics, namely,
by referring to the claim that all changes of
matter are changes of motion and that all
changes of motion are reciprocal and equal
(based on the conservation of motion). If we
add to this the point that every change of
matter has an external cause as just shown in
the second law, then the cause of the change
of motion of one body entails an equal and
opposite change of the other, which is suf-
ficient to show that action must be equal to
reaction. In his remarks on this law, Kant
refers to Newton as failing to bring this law
out of a priori concepts and Kepler’s view-
ing it as based on a force of inertia (of the
sort ruled out in the discussion of the second
law). In his ‘general observation’ on mechan-
ics, Kant refers also to the mechanical law of
continuity as based on the inertia of matter.
The Foundations of Phenomenology
The fourth and final chapter is concerned
with phenomenology or the modal experience
45
Key Works
of the motion of matter. The general notion
that is here explicated is matter in motion as
an object of experience. Motion is given as
an appearance like everything represented
through sense and thus here Kant merely
draws together the doctrines of the work,
finally indicating a modal status to some
determinations of matter. This is done in
three propositions. In the first, Kant describes
rectilinear motion as merely possible and
shows that even as possible it can only be
relative. This possible motion is equivalent
to that analysed in phoronomy. Circular
motion, by contrast to rectilinear, is an actual
predicate of matter and is equivalent to what
was expressed in dynamics. Finally, the equal
and opposite motion of a body in regard
to another body, is a necessary predicate
of matter in experience, equivalent to the
notion analysed in mechanics. In the ‘general
remark’ on phenomenology, Kant also dis-
cusses absolute space and shows that it is an
idea of reason, connecting it thereby to the
regulative ideas of pure reason discussed in
the Transcendental Dialectic of CPR.
CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL
REASON (CPrR)
Published in 1788, a year after the second
edition of CPR, this work is often simply
termed the ‘second Critique’ though Kant
himself only used the name ‘Critique’ to
refer to CPR. This work appears three years
after G and many commentators have been
confused about the relationship between
these two works. It has also confused
some with its title since the contrast with
that of CPR suggests to them that practi-
cal reason is not pure. Kant’s view, however,
as stated explicitly in the first sentence of
KEY WORKS
the ‘Preface’, is quite the opposite. The rea-
son for writing the book is to show, on the
basis of a criticism of practical reason in
general, that there is such a thing as pure
practical reason. On the basis of this dem-
onstration, Kant seeks to show, further, the
reality of transcendental freedom. The rela-
tion between freedom and the moral law
is somewhat complicated since, on the one
hand, freedom is the condition of the moral
law and, on the other hand, the relation-
ship is also the reverse. The essence of the
moral law is explicated as consisting fun-
damentally in freedom and so in this sense
freedom is the condition of the moral law.
On the other hand, the way in which one
comes to know about freedom is through
the moral law and so in this sense the moral
law is the condition of freedom.
In this work, Kant also finally cashes out
his claim that metaphysics ultimately deals,
in a positive way, with the immortality of
the soul and the existence of God though
these notions, unlike freedom, despite being
said to have ‘practical-objective reality’, do
not have the same type of ‘reality’ as free-
dom. In making these claims, Kant also
here presents his claim for the primacy of
practical reason, a claim that was of some
significance to the German Idealists. Of fur-
ther significance is the way this work cor-
roborates the argument of CPR that there is
a dual aspect to the self and, indeed, further
provides its own argument for the impor-
tance of the ideality of space and time. These
specific points are stressed by Kant himself
as reasons why this work had to be written
(CPrR 6–7) and do relate it closely to CPR
(something that is not the case for G). The
specific relationship to G that Kant states
is that this work relates to the formula of
the principle of duty provided by the earlier
work but that it is otherwise independent
46
of it (in the sense of not relying upon the
earlier work’s demonstrations). Kant also
states that in this work he has responded to
an objection raised against G by showing a
reason why the notion of the ‘good’ arises
from the consideration of the law and not
the other way around (often referred to in
contemporary philosophy as the priority of
the right over the good).
The organization of this work is partially
modelled on that of CPR but with some
important changes, only some of which Kant
is explicit about. It is divided, as was the
earlier Critique, into a doctrine of elements
and a doctrine of method though the latter
is very short and is less significant than was
the case with CPR. The doctrine of elements
includes a division between an analytic and
a dialectic but there is no separate ‘aes-
thetic’ though there are reasons for think-
ing that there is a chapter on an ‘aesthetic’
of practical reason within the Analytic (as is
partially admitted by Kant). Kant himself is
clear about the changes in the organization
of the Analytic as with this work we have an
analytic of principles prior to an analytic of
concepts with the reason given that we have,
in the area of practical reason, to deal with
the will and its causality. So we have to start
with the conditions of general causality of
the will and purify them to reach the form
fit for our enquiry prior to applying this will
first to objects and secondly to the subject (in
terms of the conditions of the ‘aesthetic’ of
practical reason).
The Analytic opens with a definition of
practical principles as ‘propositions that
contain a general determination of the will’
(CPrR 19). If we have principles that would
hold for any rational being then they will be
‘laws’ (as opposed to ‘maxims’ which are
merely subjective). Practical rules generally
involve prescription of means to given ends.

Practical Theorems
Three ‘theorems’ follow this definition, the
first stating that practical principles that pre-
suppose an object or matter are, in virtue of
this presupposition, empirical only and hence
not fit to produce ‘laws’. The second theorem
then classifies all material practical principles
as being of the same kind and listing them
under the general heading of principles of
happiness (which amounts to treating them
as ‘prudential’ as G would state). Since these
material rules require the sense of inclina-
tions that are aimed at some sense of gratifi-
cation, the corollary is that they are all part
of the ‘lower faculty of desire’ and if there
were not also purely formal laws of the will,
there would be no higher faculty of desire.
This prompts two further ‘remarks’ added
to the discussion of the second theorem with
the first pre-empting John Stuart Mill in
arguing against the view that the distinction
between ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ could be expli-
cated by taking different ‘objects’ of pleasure.
The second remark points out that principles
of self-love can include universal rules of skill
but that such rules are theoretical and not
practical principles. The third theorem then
draws the reverse implication of the second
to the effect that to think practical universal
laws these must be determined only in terms
of form. Kant again adds a ‘remark’ to this
point giving the example of determining
maxims by their form with the example of
lying in relation to deposits.
Two ‘problems’ are next stated, the first of
which concerns finding the constitution of a
will that is determinable by law alone and
the second asking how we find the law that
could determine a free will necessarily. The
answer to the first ‘problem’ is that a will
that is free is so determinable by law alone
and the answer to the second is that only a
47
Key Works
formal law could determine a free will neces-
sarily. So we have already reached an argu-
ment for seeing a free will and a formal law
as closely related to each other.
After showing this Kant first states the
‘fundamental law’ of pure practical reason
in the form of the categorical imperative
(CPrR 30). Thinking the will merely for-
mally requires thinking it separately from all
empirical conditions and to become aware
of such a law is now termed by Kant a ‘fact
of reason’ (CPrR 31). The fourth theorem
claims that the sole principle of all moral
laws and of duties in keeping with them is
autonomy (which accords with the argument
of G). This notion is thought just negatively
when we consider ourselves as independ-
ent of determination from all matter but is
thought positively when we think the moral
law as itself grounded in reason alone. There
is required for any act of willing a matter that
is willed but this is not sufficient to reach the
conclusion that the determining ground of all
volition is itself a matter. To begin with, this
does not fit the notion of rational beings as
such (which would have to include the way
God would will). But, further, this determina-
tion by the matter could not give the basis of
morality in any case. In demonstrating this
second claim Kant considers examples as he
had in the second part of G. Key among the
examples is false testimony (lying), which
presents a maximal image of someone deter-
mined only by prudential maxims. The point
of the examples in this case is only to act as
a reductio of the view that happiness could
serve as a universal basis of moral law.
The Deduction of the Principles
of Pure Practical Reason
Kant next turns to a ‘Deduction’ of the prin-
ciples of pure practical reason. In the course
KEY WORKS
of presenting this, Kant refers to the differ-
ence of procedure of this Critique to the first
one. Whereas CPR proceeded by means of a
contrast between concepts and intuitions and
then arrived at synthetic a priori principles
CPrR, on the basis of the moral law, points
to a pure world of the understanding that is
determined positively.
The point now is to show that the sensible
world can be contrasted with a supersensible
one and the latter has its basis in terms of the
autonomous laws of pure reason. This law is
the moral law which transfers us, in thought,
into a nature governed by pure reason.
Again, the nature of ‘testimony’ is adduced
to demonstrate the way in which such a law
can determine us.
The problem of how pure reason can be
an immediate determining ground of the will
requires no reference to a priori intuition but
only to the concept of freedom. This is suf-
ficient to give an exposition of the supreme
principle of practical reason. The deduction
concerns the justification of the objective and
universal validity of the synthetic a priori that
is stated in the law. But there is no ‘deduction’
of the law itself as it is rather the case that the
law is the basis of the deduction of freedom.
The moral law is, as has been shown, a law
of causality by means of freedom and so it
fills in the blank merely problematic possibil-
ity of freedom that was bequeathed by CPR.
This law is a determinate law of causality in
an intelligible world.
The Cognition of Pure Practical Reason
To think the moral law is however to relate
the form of law of the intelligible world to
the sensible world in a causative way and
this requires extending cognition beyond the
sensible world, something that was denied
as possible in CPR. The practical use of pure
48
reason thus appears to extend cognition
beyond what is possible for theoretical rea-
son. This requires relating practical reason
to theoretical reason in order to think again
about the boundaries of cognition. Kant
reverts back to the case of Hume’s doubts
concerning causation, first mentioned in P
as the basis of critique starting work. The
result of this, as summarized again here,
was the transcendental distinction between
appearances and things in themselves and
that the problem of causal connection was
resolvable if seen as a question of appear-
ances and their condition in temporality.
The reason why all this is invoked again
here, however, becomes clearer when we
recall that the causality of the will is the
starting point of CPrR. The objective real-
ity of the pure will is given a priori by the
moral law and the causality of this will
involves freedom. The notion of causation
in the most general sense was shown by the
ability to think causality as a pure category
and we have now connected this thought to
that of the moral law.
The ‘Objects’ of Practical Reason
Kant now turns to the Analytic of Concepts
of CPrR where ‘a concept of an object of
practical reason’ means ‘the representation of
an object as an effect possible through free-
dom’ (CPrR 57). The type of possibility in
question is clearly moral possibility and the
only objects of it are ‘the good’ and ‘the evil’.
The ‘good’ however, if thought as the basis
of law, can only mean some form of pleas-
ure and that would be to take the good to
be equivalent to the agreeable. The ‘paradox
of method’ of this work is thus explained,
namely, the reason why the concepts of
good and evil are not determined prior to
the notion of the moral law but only as a

consequence of the latter. In presenting the
priority of the law over the concepts of the
good and evil, Kant reverses the procedure of
moral philosophy since this has traditionally
taken an object of the will as a matter and
ground of the law. This left two forms of het-
eronomous ethics, that grounded in feeling
alone (happiness) and that based on a mat-
ter derived from concepts (such as the will of
God). Having made this point Kant performs
next a kind of ‘metaphysical deduction’ of
the categories of freedom (CPrR 66).
While the concepts of good and evil give
an object for the will, this object is itself
based on a practical rule of reason. Now,
at this point, Kant returns to the question
of the relationship between such a rule of
reason and the specific determination of
actions. Specific actions are empirical and
hence are part of the experience of nature
so the question arises of how a law of free-
dom applies to the particulars of nature.
After all, the supersensible world appears
completely different in kind to the sensible.
So the law relates not to the actions directly
but rather to actions by means of a schema,
but not one that involves intuition so that
what the law is related to is not imagina-
tion but rather the understanding. The
understanding provides the type of a law of
nature and it is by relating to this that the
moral law is schematized which gives what
Kant terms ‘the rule of judgment under laws
of pure practical reason’ (CPrR 69), which
is nothing other than the law of nature for-
mula that was set out as the first basis for
discussion of examples in G. This provides
us with a thought experiment by which we
can relate to actions as if they were the basis
of a law of nature. Kant again invokes the
example of lying to show this. The type of
the sensible world is used thus to govern the
intelligible world.
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The ‘aesthetic’ of practical reason
The last major chapter of the Analytic is
taken up with the provision of an ‘aesthetics’
in which the question is addressed of how to
give the law influence on the will. For the law
to be operative, we must relate to our will as
free, namely, as independent of material incli-
nations but this is only a negative account of
the law’s operation on the will. This negative
effect operates when we compare our con-
duct to that enjoined by the will and find it
wanting; there we suffer a feeling of humili-
ation. But the positive way the law operates
on the will is as an object that is itself posi-
tive as it is an intellectual causality that is an
object of respect. The purely negative effect is
pathological but respect is a feeling produced
solely by reason itself. The latter is given an
example in the conduct of another who dem-
onstrates by their way of acting the possibil-
ity of being moral. Duty is that to which we
are called by the law. The condition of agree-
ment with the autonomy of the will is the self-
direction of reason to act in accord with duty
and this shows the inner presence of action in
accord with the law to lie within ourselves.
Hence the real incentive to act morally is that
such action brings out the intelligible nature
of personality. The Analytic of CPrR closes
with a ‘critical elucidation’ that investigates
and justifies the form of the Analytic itself.
Here Kant again compares the organization
of CPrR with that of CPR and shows en
route that without the ideality of space and
time there would be no way to forestall fatal-
ism (CPrR 101–102).
The Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason
The Dialectic that follows the Analytic
relates, as did that of CPR, to an uncondi-
tioned totality, here in terms of the ‘highest
KEY WORKS
good’. Kant distinguishes first between two
types of notion of the ‘good’ distinguishing
the ‘supreme’ good (which is the moral law)
from the ‘highest’ which refers to a world in
which all that is desirable is brought together
so that there is harmony between the law and
happiness. The two elements of the highest
good are heterogeneous to each other and yet
have to be combined if there is a thought of
such a world possible.
Kant refers to the antinomy between ways
of relating happiness and the good together
through a rendition of the doctrines of the
Epicureans and the Stoics. If the Epicurean
doctrine is understood as suggesting the
good will results from happiness, the Stoic,
on the contrary, suggests happiness will result
from acting in a way that is good. Neither
describes what occurs in the world for us
though there is some conditional truth in the
Stoic claim since overcoming the inclinations
for the sake of the law is capable of produc-
ing contentment.
Kant next introduces the thesis of the
primacy of practical reason over theoretical
using it to show a necessary basis for arriving
at a sense of the unity of reason as a whole.
It is then possible to introduce the ‘postu-
lates’ of pure practical reason, freedom, the
immortality of the soul and the existence of
God. Attainment of the highest good is not
possible unless the soul is immortal since it
is only viewed as such that the attainment of
the state described of a harmony between the
law and the will could be achieved. However
for nature to correspond with the will in the
way pictured in the postulate of the immor-
tality of the soul is for there to be an inner
ground of connection between the two. The
basis of this thought requires a causality that
could be the ground of such connection and
this is in the thought of God. Kant’s rendition
of the possibility of such a virtuous world is
50
thus presented here in a different way to G
as it is now in the form of a kingdom of God
(CPrR 128) rather than merely as a kingdom
of ends.
After stating the postulates, Kant returns a
second time to the question of how an exten-
sion of pure reason for practical purposes
can be granted without extending this to the
cognition of theoretical reason. The point
is here made that pure practical cognition
requires reference to a priori purposes. The
postulates are required in order to think the
highest good but this does not give us any
intuitions that correspond to the thought
given so there is no theoretical cognition sup-
plied here. God is thus adopted as a notion
not of physics but only of morals.
The last part of CPrR concerns the doc-
trine of method which is understood here
as the way in which the laws of pure practi-
cal reason are to be given access to the mind
so that they can influence the nature of our
maxims. Here Kant provides some elemen-
tary remarks on moral education attacking
in particular the reference to noble or supere-
rogatory ideas to spur on moral conduct. The
general point is that morality is best presented
as an incentive in education the more purely
it is shown and separated from all feelings.
CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT (CJ)
This work was published in 1790 and is the
third and final work that is titled with the
term ‘critique’. It is, of the three ‘critiques’,
the most complicated in terms of its textual
organization. This is for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it has not one but two ‘introductions’.
What has become generally referred to as
the ‘First Introduction’ (FI) was the first one
Kant wrote but it was not included in the

first published edition of CJ. Kant officially
rejected it because of its length although he
appears to have been working on it as late
as the early months of 1790 and referred to
it in correspondence as a useful entry into
the work. It was first published in 1833
and became part of the Akademie edition of
Kant’s writings in the twentieth century.
The second introduction, published in CJ,
does to an extent parallel the first one but is
also different from it. Students of CJ do tend
to discuss both and there is much controversy
about the relationship between them. The sec-
ond, even more important textual difficulty,
concerns the fact that CJ contains within its
covers two distinct works, which are appar-
ently also united in the book as a whole. The
first half of the book is entitled a ‘Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment’ while the second part is
titled a ‘Critique of Teleological Judgment’.
Both the two halves of the work include the
division between analytic and dialectic and
method that was given in CPrR though the
discussion of method is very extended in
the Critique of Teleological Judgment but
only very brief in the case of the Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment. The question of why two
apparently distinct works are joined together
in the cover of one book has often puzzled
commentators, though some have neglected
the discussion of teleology altogether (this
is particularly true for Anglo-American
philosophers).
These two complicated textual questions
are related as the two introductions both
contain detailed discussions of the nature of
the Critical system and the reason there is a
need for an independent critique focused on
the faculty (or ‘power’) of judgment and so
give pointers to how to understand the rela-
tionship between the two halves of the book.
There is, in addition, a ‘Preface’ in which
Kant points out that CPR was concerned
51
Key Works
really only with cognition and hence with
the faculty of the understanding as only it
could provide us with constitutive a priori
principles. CPrR, by contrast, demonstrated
that the constitutive a priori principles of the
faculty of reason could only exist in relation
to the capacity of desire. CJ investigates the
question of whether judgment, which medi-
ates between understanding and reason, also
has a priori principles of its own and, if it
does, whether they are constitutive.
As part of the general ‘critique of pure rea-
son’ (as opposed to what is carried on under
that name in the book of that title) it is nec-
essary to address this question. In order to
investigate it, the principle of judgment, if it
has one, must be distinguished from the a pri-
ori concepts that are the province of under-
standing and hence it must be something that
serves as a rule for the power of judgment
itself. Kant indicates a link of this question
to the investigation of judgments concerning
the beautiful and the sublime as these judg-
ments do not provide us with cognition but
still belong to the cognitive power and relate
this power to the feelings of pleasure and dis-
pleasure. This is different from a logical judg-
ment of nature that relates to a lawfulness
that sensible concepts appear unable to reach
and which relates in some sense to the super-
sensible. The latter type of judgment has no
direct relation to pleasure and would, alone,
just be a kind of appendix to CPR. Kant also
announces the completion of his critical
enterprise with the publication of this book
and indicates he will now proceed to the doc-
trinal one though this makes little sense of
his previous publication of MFNS.
The First Introduction
FI opens with a discussion of philosophy as
a system, which appears to relate back to the
KEY WORKS
discussions of architectonic in CPR. Kant
here states that the general ‘critique of pure
reason’ does not belong to a system of phi-
losophy but rather examines the idea of this
system. If philosophy is not merely con-
cerned with logic, then it has material princi-
ples that concern the objects we think about.
Philosophy is then divided into two parts,
theoretical and practical, and this leads Kant
to correct the common confusion of ‘practi-
cal’ precepts with ‘technical’ ones.
Kant next proceeds to look at the higher
cognitive powers that lie at the basis of phi-
losophy repeating the distinction between
understanding, judgment and reason. The
point of this distinction is to show that judg-
ment is a power to subsume concepts that are
given to it from somewhere else. So if there
is a specific principle of judgment, it has to
relate to nature as something that conforms
to the special power of judgment. This rela-
tion turns out to have to do with how higher
and lower laws are connected to each other.
In this case, the question is how we are able
to treat empirical laws as part of a system of
experience, something that is quite different
from what is achieved by the understand-
ing. In this case, we appear to have a formal
notion of lawfulness (similar to what was dis-
cussed in practical philosophy) which relates
to specific laws. Such an inquiry belongs to
the general ‘critique of pure reason’ but not
to the system of philosophy as a doctrine.
Kant next turns to discussing the system
of the powers of the mind, distinguishing
between cognition, pleasure and displeasure,
and desire. Kant here rejects the intellectual-
ist desire to subsume all these powers under
cognition and makes clear the need for an
investigation of the feelings of pleasure and
displeasure as determined by the power of
judgment. Experience as a system for judg-
ment is investigated with Kant suggesting
52
that empirical laws could be so heterogeneous
to each other that they might not be able to
be brought under a common principle. Since
the only way to forestall this is if we have a
principle of the unity of such laws we need to
presuppose that there is such a principle. The
presupposition in question is a principle of
judgment and it is on the basis of it that we
can adopt formulas that state claims on the
economic organization of nature (FI 210).
Judgment is now examined as containing
two possible abilities, either reflecting on
that which is represented in terms of its pos-
sibility or determining concepts by means of
some given empirical presentation. This dis-
tinguishes between reflective and determinant
judgment and the reflective power is now
described as a specific power of judgment
(as opposed to the formation of universal
concepts of nature which is a determinative
act of judgment). But for judgment to be able
to reflect, it must have its own principle, a
principle that enables at least the logical
organization of empirical laws (FI 215–216).
Roughly put, it is on this basis that teleologi-
cal judgment is possible.
Now, in CPR, Kant had restricted the sense
of the ‘aesthetic’ in such a way as to deny any
scientific status to judgments of taste. Here,
however, he makes a change allowing for the
notion of aesthetic judgments but doing so as
something that refers not to a determination
of objects but only to the manner of judging
of subjects. Such an aesthetic judgment is not
produced directly from sensations of objects
but rather from a sensation produced by a
relationship between the faculties of the sub-
ject in relation to certain objects being given
to it. This is termed by Kant a legislation that
is heautonomous (not autonomous as with
reason) as here judgment does not legislate
either to nature or to freedom but only to
itself.

In FI, Kant describes the division of CJ as
a distinction between the aesthetic of reflec-
tive judgment and its logic (where the latter
is provided by teleology). Kant adds to this
a distinction between intrinsic and relative
purposiveness where the former is based in
the presentation of the object and the latter
on some kind of use of the object’s way of
being given. This division relates the sense
of intrinsic purposiveness to beauty and the
relative sense to sublimity whereas intrinsic
teleological purposiveness concerns perfec-
tion and relative purposiveness use.
The Second Introduction
The published second introduction also
begins with the division of philosophy, refer-
ring to the distinction between theoretical
and practical philosophy with the focus of the
first on nature and the second on freedom.
Following the discussion in G, Kant points
out that the notion of freedom requires a
moral sense of determination that is distinct
from anything technical. Subsequently Kant
points to understanding as having its realm
in nature and reason in that of freedom. In
contrast to both notions is the supersensi-
ble as something unbounded but the basis
of unity between the concepts of nature and
freedom appears to have a necessary rela-
tionship to the supersensible. Judgment is
now introduced as a mediating link between
understanding and reason and the independ-
ent province of judgment emerges when it is
considered reflectively. This reflective use of
judgment concerns particular empirical laws
which are viewed by it as if an understanding
that was distinct from ours had given them
a unity. The unity in question is presented as
a ‘purposive’ one. Kant next connects this
sense of purposiveness to the feeling of pleas-
ure since the means by which we arrive at
53
Key Works
the sense of the purposiveness in question is
not due to response to features of objects but
rather to our mode of viewing them.
Judgments of taste are judgments in which
the pleasure that is expressed is one that
claims universal validity. Kant clearly dis-
tinguishes these judgments of taste from the
other form of aesthetic judgment, the judg-
ment of sublimity as the latter is concerned
with ‘intellectual feeling’ connecting imagi-
nation to reason rather than understanding.
The second introduction is clearer than the
first both in terms of the distinction between
the beautiful and the sublime and in terms of
the need for reference to the supersensible.
The Architectonic of the Critique
ofAesthetic Judgment
The Critique of Aesthetic Judgment opens
with an analytic of aesthetic judgment,
which is sub-divided in ways that has caused
confusion. There is a distinction between the
Analytic of the Beautiful and the Analytic
of the Sublime but, after the closure of the
Analytic of the Sublime, there is a return to
the beautiful with a section deducing judg-
ments of taste, a section itself followed by
an undeclared final section that discusses
art. The Analytic of the Beautiful is divided
into four headings following the Table of
Categories of CPR but, in this case, the
moment of quality is presented first.
Taste and Aesthetics
This first moment declares a judgment of
taste to be an aesthetic one as its determin-
ing basis has no ground in the object judged.
An important implication of this is then
drawn out, to the effect that the kind of lik-
ing involved in a judgment of taste is dis-
tinct from all ‘interest’ meaning by this that
KEY WORKS
it has no necessary relationship to the object
judged about existing. This distinguishes the
judgment of taste from judgments concerning
both what is merely agreeable (which refers
to the senses) and what is good (which refers
to the will’s desire for something to exist).
Aesthetic Universality
The quantity of the judgment of taste is
universal as what is presented as beautiful
is something that we expect all to like but
the liking in question, since it is aesthetic,
will have a subjective form of universality.
The logical quantity of aesthetic judgments
is also, in a sense, singular since it requires
connection to feelings of pleasure and dis-
pleasure and can only be made once it has
been seen to accord with them. So aesthetic
universality is also singular, hence is unlike
logical universality in having this character.
Despite this, statements concerning aesthetic
universality have the form of logical univer-
sality. Kant at this point resolves this prob-
lem, which we will see to recur, through the
postulation of a universal voice that lays
claim to general agreement.
After invoking this universal voice, Kant
turns to the problem that he claims is ‘key’
to the critique of taste, namely whether the
feeling of pleasure precedes the judgment of
taste concerning an object or whether the
judging precedes the pleasure. Having raised
this question, Kant rules out the first answer
immediately since, he claims, it would require
us to view the pleasure as being the same as
what occurs with the agreeable, basically
that it would be grounded in sensation. So
there must instead be something in the men-
tal state that leads us to express the judgment
of taste and is its condition that leads to the
pleasure arising later. This something is taken
by Kant to be ‘universal communicability’
54
and is argued to be grounded on a relation-
ship between the capacities of imagination
and understanding when they connect the
presenting of something to the notion of cog-
nition in general. The suggestion is that this
connection requires the cognitive powers to
be ‘in free play’.
Explaining this point requires Kant to
revert back to the account of cognition
derived from CPR as he reminds us now that
imagination combines the manifold and the
understanding unifies it. In the case of the
judgment of taste, these two are brought
together without conceptual unification,
which is why the result is a subjective univer-
sality. The unification in question is a form of
relationship between the faculties that leads
to the ‘feeling’ of accord between them with-
out this feeling being the result of a sensation
that was externally produced.
Aesthetic Purposiveness
The relational element of judgments of taste
is thought in terms of purposiveness as would
be expected after the discussions of the
two introductions. Kant now arrives at the
notion of purposiveness without a purpose
which does not invoke the causes of the pur-
pose in question but rests purely on the form
of purposiveness of an object but, given the
earlier claim about the absence of interest in
judgments of taste, this notion of purposive-
ness has to be distinguished from the kind of
‘charm’ that depends on material features of
objects. This leads Kant to emphasize instead
the notion of ‘design’ and, later, to formulate
his conception of the Ideal of Beauty.
The Ideal refers to the interesting problem
of general agreement concerning judgments
of taste, an agreement that persists despite the
subjective nature of such assessments. Kant
at this point invokes the notion that some

products of taste are exemplary and grounds
this on the view that the models of taste are
ideas which have been presented to sensible
exhibition. However, the Ideal of beauty is
not an object of an entirely pure judgment of
taste since it includes a reference to a basis
for taste in something intellectual and Kant
suggests it only really refers to humanity
itself as the appropriate object of such ideali-
zation. This Ideal basically expresses some-
thing moral and is the first explicit point of
connection between taste and morality. The
modal status of judgments of taste expresses
necessity and refers to another Idea, the Idea
of Common Sense. This idea seeks to give a
further basis to the normative claims involved
in judgments of taste and Kant returns later
to this idea.
The Aesthetics of the Sublime
The Analytic of the Sublime opens with a
contrast between judgments concerning the
beautiful and those expressing sublimity. The
former are now suggested to require indeter-
minate concepts of understanding while the
latter, by contrast, require indeterminate con-
cepts of reason. However the two judgments
are also distinguished in terms of the fact
that while judgments of beauty arise directly
and immediately, judgments of sublimity are
indirect and mediated. There is some sort
of check on us before we assert that we are
faced with something sublime, something
that holds us back before allowing us to go
forward and, due to this, Kant defines the
pleasure that accompanies sublimity as a
‘negative’ form of pleasure. This ‘negative’
element of sublimity is further accentuated
when Kant describes the arising of the feel-
ing that accompanies this judgment as one
that is ‘violent’ and ‘incommensurate’ with
our capacity to exhibit things. The discussion
55
Key Works
of the sublime that follows also differs from
the account of the beautiful as it is divided
between the ‘mathematical’ and the ‘dynami-
cal’ sublime (following the division of the
Table of Categories in CPR).
Kant opens the account of the mathemati-
cal sublime by describing the sublime as
involving what is absolutely large, a point
that ensures that the mathematical sublime
is not a quantity as it exceeds all measure.
Largeness is a notion that normally involves
comparison but in this case we are not oper-
ating with a standard that is one of deter-
minate magnitude but only with an aesthetic
one. The aesthetic relation to such a notion
of largeness involves a kind of liking and
since nothing fits the standard of absolute
largeness it follows that this is not a standard
that describes objects of sense themselves but
rather the way our mind expands in relation
to such. For this to arise we have a connec-
tion to our intuition in terms of whether it is
possible to take something in, which requires
our apprehension to match an ability of
comprehension. This meets limits as when
we are faced with something that as we try
to measure its extent before us exceeds our
ability to combine moments of its presenta-
tion together and then we have an aesthetic
experience of largeness.
This checking of our power runs up
against the endeavour to think the entirety
of the exhibited in concepts as is required by
reason. In order even to be able to think of
something as large to the extent that such
notions as the infinite can arise there must be
a supersensible power within us and it is to
this that the surpassing power of the exhibi-
tion must be related (which is a connection
of imagination to reason). The feeling that is
aroused in us by the sense that there are exhi-
bitions that defeat our measuring power is a
feeling of respect. Our inability to determine
KEY WORKS
the absolutely large proves both the inade-
quacy of our mind to deal with all phenom-
ena and yet also shows a sense of it that is
admirable since it aims to meet an ideal that
is beyond it. So the feeling of the mathemati-
cal sublime is a kind of displeasure arising
from our inadequacy combined with a pleas-
ure in our possession of rational ideas.
The discussion of the dynamically sub-
lime opens with a discussion of the might of
nature where ‘might’ means something supe-
rior to all obstacles. Nature, when related to
as possessed of dynamic sublimity, is under-
stood to contain such power. Kant provides
examples of the way nature appears thus to
us and then represents us as not directly con-
fronted with nature’s power but as contem-
plating it. It is by this means that we arrive at
the dynamically sublime. Again, it is by being
raised above nature that we arrive at the sense
of sublimity. This does require the sense that
we are receptive to ideas, however, and due
to the need for this, judgments of dynami-
cal sublimity require culture. Kant’s discus-
sion of the sublime is much briefer than his
account of judgment though it has produced
some of the most creative commentary.13
Aesthetic Deduction
After the discussion of the Analytic of the
Sublime, Kant returns to the question of judg-
ments of taste in order to provide a ‘deduc-
tion’ of pure aesthetic judgments. The reason
this deduction is provided for pure aesthetic
judgments and not for judgments concerned
with sublimity is due to the claim that a
deduction is needed if the liking in question
concerns the form of the object (since judg-
ments of sublimity suppose something ‘form-
less’). Further, the reason for the deduction in
question is that the pure aesthetic judgment
has a form of necessity despite not being
56
cognitive. Since it is not cognitive, its univer-
sality is not a result of established agreement
but rests in some way on the autonomous
powers of subjectivity.
Judgments of taste are peculiar in that they
make a claim to universal assent as if they
were objective and yet are only subjective.
However, there is no apparent way of prov-
ing a judgment of taste to be correct, despite
this claim they possess to universal validity.
Kant goes on to argue that judgments of taste
are synthetic a priori judgments and thus
connects the problem concerning them to the
general problem of Critical philosophy. The
liking expressed in the judgment of taste is
argued to be grounded on the purposiveness
of the form of an object for the capacity of
judgment. If there is such a connection for
us then we have to work on the assumption
that it is possible also for others. We simply
make this assumption in the deduction as we
do not have to show the ‘objective’ reality of
the judgment of taste. Despite this being the
case, we can make the assumption due to the
point that the capacities assumed as opera-
tive were shown in CPR to be required for
cognition. This leads Kant into the extended
discussion of ‘common sense’ that proved so
important for Hannah Arendt14 and in which
Kant discusses the procedure of comparing
our judgment with the possible standards of
others in order to arrive at a merely formal
basis for our statements.
Kant’s Account of Art
At this point, Kant begins the final part of the
Analytic of the Beautiful but does so without
formally announcing the opening of a new
part. In the remainder of the Analytic, he
concerns himself with an enquiry that hinges
primarily on a discussion of art. It opens,
however, with a discussion of something

ruled out of account earlier as part of the
Analytic of the Beautiful, namely, an inves-
tigation of empirical interest in the beautiful.
This interest is something that, we are now
told, can be considered after we have dis-
cussed the pure aesthetic judgment. It arises
in society where we expect communication
of pleasures to take place and where it can
become refined. Kant next considers ‘intel-
lectual’ interest in the beautiful, which he
relates to the beauty of nature rather than to
the beauty of art. The reason for this claim is
then argued to be that in the case of interest in
the beautiful in nature we concern ourselves
with a connection between the mind and that
which in nature seems to accord with it and
this is taken by Kant to be grounded on a
‘moral’ interest. This even leads him to mak-
ing claims about the connection of the colour
spectrum to moral qualities (CJ 302).
Interestingly, it is after these two discus-
sions of different kinds of ‘interest’ that can
be attached to the beautiful that Kant turns
to discussing art, a discussion that fills the
rest of the Analytic of Aesthetic Judgment.
First, Kant gives a generic account of art dis-
tinguishing it from nature, science and craft.
After this generic description has been given,
Kant then turns to a specific discussion of
‘fine’ art, which intends to arouse feelings of
pleasure in relation to cognition and so has a
standard in reflective judgment and not sen-
sation. The basis of such art is next shown to
reside in ‘genius’ as this ‘gives the rule’ (CJ
307) to art. Genius is presented as a talent
to produce something that transcends deter-
minate rules and is original but also exem-
plary. Since genius has, however, no specific
‘science’ by which it operates it cannot be
said to be grounded on a theory but is rather
expressive of a ‘nature’. Given this account
of genius, it is not surprising that Kant con-
cludes that genius is only operative in art and
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has no place in science, since science would
require precisely the determinate rules that
are missing in the productions of genius.
The principle of genius is subsequently
argued to be the ability to exhibit aesthetic
ideas where these ideas are presentations of
imagination to which no concept is adequate
(the reverse of rational ideas). So the mental
powers that are brought into connection by
genius are imagination and understanding.
For fine art to exist, both genius and taste are
required as genius alone will give something
that is inspired but not refined while taste
alone would give refinement but not neces-
sarily inspiration. Taste is thus presented as
not merely necessary for judging but also for
producing aesthetic art even though such art
is not judged by pure judgments of taste.
Kant subsequently divides the fine arts into
three classes, those of speech (rhetoric and
poetry), visual arts (plastic and painting) and
beautiful play of sensations (music and the
art of colour). Subsequently to this is added
an account of how the different arts can be
combined together in such mixed forms as
drama, dance and opera. Kant concludes
his discussion of art by a consideration of
the respective aesthetic value of the differ-
ent fine arts ranking poetry the foremost art
and indicating that music has less value than
other arts due to its greater dependence on
sensation and to its inability to produce more
than a transitory impression. The final ‘com-
ment’ section of the Analytic expands the
discussion to include laughter and even an
account of jokes.
Aesthetic Dialectic
The second division of the Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment concerns the dialectic
of it. The Dialectic is carefully stated not to
be a dialectic of taste itself but rather of the
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critique of taste and to be concerned with the
principles of this critique. Kant now presents
an antinomy that concerns whether or not
taste is based on concepts since, on the one
hand, it appears there is no disputing con-
cerning taste, while, on the other hand, we
can and do quarrel about it. Resolving this
antinomy requires showing that the parties
to it have different senses of a ‘concept’ in
question. In agreement with those who sug-
gest that taste does depend on a concept,
Kant points to the claims of such judgments
of taste to necessary validity. However, in
agreement with those objecting to the claim
that taste is based on concepts, Kant points
to the inability to prove claims about taste.
In indicating this, Kant points to the differ-
ence between concepts of the understanding
and concepts of reason where the first are
determinate and the second are not. The con-
cept on which a judgment of taste depends is
hence not susceptible to proof as it is not a
concept of understanding. But there is a con-
cept that enables quarrelling to happen and
this is a concept of reason. The indeterminate
concept on which taste depends is the super-
sensible substrate of appearances.
Having stated and ‘resolved’ this antinomy,
Kant proceeds to connect it to the antinomies
that were the concern of the dialectics of the
two earlier Critiques and does so by suggest-
ing that the theoretical antinomies point to
the undetermined supersensible of nature,
the practical antinomy to the supersensible
as the principle of our cognitive power and
the antinomy of reflective judgment as the
principle of the harmony of the two preced-
ing forms of the supersensible. The Critique
of Aesthetic Judgment then reaches a conclu-
sion with a discussion of how beauty can be
a symbol of morality in which an analogy
is presented between the beautiful and the
good. Finally, there is a very brief discussion
58
of ‘methodology’ in which Kant argues that
there can be no ‘science’ of the beautiful.
Kant’s Critique of Teleology
The Critique of Teleological Judgment fol-
lows immediately after the discussion of why
there can be no independent ‘method’ of pure
aesthetic judgment. By far, the lion’s share
of attention given to CJ has concerned the
Critique of Aesthetic Judgment though there
are now studies that are beginning to chal-
lenge this.15
Kant opens this discussion by arguing
for the need for an account of ‘objective’
purposiveness in nature albeit understood
as a regulative and not a constitutive prin-
ciple. Kant begins by distinguishing formal
purposiveness from material purposiveness,
describing now the former as manifested
in geometry and as not requiring teleology.
Relative purposiveness is next distinguished
from intrinsic where the latter is imputed to
the object itself rather than merely something
concerning its use. Finally, Kant refers to
‘natural purposes’, which are the real subject
of the rest of his investigation and which pos-
sess recursive causality giving the example of
a tree (CJ 371–372). Such natural purposes
have parts whose possibility depends on the
whole due to being reciprocally causes and
effects of the form in question, a claim that
leads Kant to distinguish the ‘force’ of organ-
ized beings from that of beings that are only
‘machines’ (CJ 374).
Having given this account of ‘natural pur-
poses’, Kant discusses next the principle by
which nature in general is approached as a
system of purposes, which involves an eco-
nomical approach to nature as an integrated
whole (CJ 379). Teleology is next described
as having a place in natural science only as
providing us with a method of approach and

not as justifying the postulate of a separate
causality for explanation so the necessity
attaching to teleology is not one suggested
to be present in the physical character of
things.
The Dialectic of Teleological Judgment
is unusual in being slightly longer than the
Analytic. In introducing the Dialectic, Kant
points out that determinant judgment has
no concepts of objects and no antinomy of
its own but that reflective judgment is dif-
ferent in this regard. However, when he goes
on to present this antinomy, he suggests the
difference between an antinomy that con-
cerns regulative principles and one which
concerns constitutive ones with regard to
empirical laws of nature. The antinomy that
concerns regulative principles arises natu-
rally from reflective judgment and has to be
answered by means of its examination while
a constitutive antinomy here is not plausi-
ble since reason could not, in this province,
prove either of the two possible conflicting
maxims. Hence it is false to claim, as is often
done, that Kant resolves the antinomy of tel-
eological judgment by merely showing both
assertions in it to be regulative. Rather, it is
as an antinomy of regulative maxims that he
examines it. The antinomy broadly concerns
the question of whether merely mechanical
laws are sufficient to account for nature or
whether we also require the invocation of
final causes.
Reflectively considered, it is necessary to
consider final causes as something distinct
from mechanism; that much is also shown
by the Analytic of Teleology. Kant goes on
to consider the various systems that have
been proposed in response to the problem
of accounting for teleology and distinguishes
them as consisting either in idealistic or
realistic interpretations of purposiveness.
The former either base nature on laws of
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motion alone (ancient materialistic systems
are mentioned) or on fatalistic principles
(where Spinoza is mentioned). Realistic
accounts of purposiveness, by contrast, see
it either as physically realistic (hylozoism) or
as realistic in relation to an intelligent being
(theism). Kant proceeds to argue against all
these systems stating that the ancient mate-
rialisms failed to distinguish the technic of
nature from mechanism and had to call in
chance as an ultimate basis of law while the
fatalistic form of account deprives the world
of contingency and makes all necessary. The
hylozoistic view is denied since Kant can give
no sense to the idea of living matter and the
theistic account presupposes an earlier deter-
minative judgment about the need for the
intelligent being to explain nature.
This survey of dogmatic solutions to the
problem of teleology leads Kant to reas-
sert the point that natural products contain
natural necessity while also having contin-
gent form. It is due to this combination that
they form a problem for reflective judgment.
We are required, in order to address this,
to examine our cognitive powers even to
the extent of seeing that there is no deter-
minate way (as theism supposes) of proving
the existence of God but only of showing
the cognitive reasons we are led to suppose
such an existence as required in the system
of nature. Kant next reverts to the point that
understanding and intuition are necessarily
heterogeneous for us and that this, combined
with the need of reason to reach totality, cre-
ates the basis of the antinomy of teleological
judgment. But a different understanding to
ours would not have the same characteris-
tics and an intuitive understanding is con-
ceivable. Not only is such an understanding
conceivable but we have already been led to
suppose that nature has a supersensible sub-
strate by earlier inquiries. We can further see
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how, for such an understanding, there could
be a common higher principle of nature’s
laws beyond both mechanism and teleology.
For ourselves we cannot explain organized
beings in terms of mechanism though this
is only a point for reflective judgment on
organized beings. This leads to the conclu-
sion that all we can do is subordinate the
mechanistic production of organisms to
the teleological one without requiring, in
so doing, a scientific ground for the use of
teleology. The two principles are assumed
to be reconciled entirely in the supersensible
substrate but in ways we cannot know. All
explanation has to follow the mechanistic
model although the production of organized
beings cannot be so accounted for.
The ‘methodology’ of teleological judg-
ment is one of the longest methodologies in
the Critiques. It opens with Kant reiterating
that teleology does not belong to natural sci-
ence but only to critique and indicating that
we should use the principle of mechanism
as far as we possibly can. Kant also here
considers and counters Hume’s objections
to teleological discussions as Hume fails to
understand the extrinsic character of purposes
to nature. Kant also flatly rejects Leibnizian
pre-established harmony, occasionalism and
what he terms ‘the theory of evolution’ (CJ
423), which is a form of theory of pre-for-
mation of matter and which is contrasted
with epigenesis. The latter theory, derived in
part from Blumenbach, sees organization as
original and as having a force separate from
that of matter as Kant had argued earlier in
the Analytic.
Kant next turns to the ‘ultimate purpose’ of
nature as a teleological system and describes
humanity as the ‘ultimate purpose’ of nature
and gives an argument for seeing human
culture as more important than human hap-
piness. This discussion marks a turn in the
60
work which from this point on becomes
more concerned with practical rather than
theoretical questions about teleology.
Kant provides a miniature description of
his view of human historical development
including the need within it for war as part of
this development. After this interlude, Kant
returns to the basis for viewing humanity as
the ‘ultimate purpose’ of nature and suggests
it is humanity considered as noumenon that
is such a purpose. After making this claim,
Kant describes the reasons why physical tel-
eology has always tended to be the primary
form that is presented and yet discounts the
view that moral claims can be founded on it
stating that a purely physical teleology could
at best be the basis of a demonology. By con-
trast, an ethical teleology can be presented
on the basis of the idea, first broached in G,
of a ‘kingdom of ends’. Kant also provides
here a further statement of the ‘moral proof’
of the existence of God which was first
given in CPrR. It is given greater vividness
here and the status of the postulate of God
is more clearly defined as one that can be
subjectively understood to be ‘constitutive’
(CJ 457). The properties of God are only
presented by means of analogy and God is
denied to be a possible object of cognition.
Considering God in only such a practical role
prevents theology from either soaring too
high or sinking too low and leaves God as an
object of ‘faith’ in the sense of being beyond
theoretical cognition.
RELIGION WITHIN THE BOUNDARIES
OF MERE REASON (R)
The complication in the textual history of
this work concerns Kant’s engagements with
the censorship of his time. Kant originally

intended to write a series of essays on reli-
gion for the Berlinische Monatsschrift and
submitted the initial one (on the topic of
radical evil) without problem but had the
second essay refused the right to publication.
Kant therefore took back the second essay
and decided he would re-publish the first
essay (first published in 1792) with the fol-
lowing three he had intended to accompany
that essay in book form. Since the second
essay had been rejected by a theology censor,
Kant now took the trouble to assess whether
the works really merited being considered
as belonging under the heading of theology.
So it was submitted to the theology faculty
at Königsberg who declared it to be outside
their remit as it was a philosophical work. It
was then submitted to the philosophy faculty
at Jena who declared it fit for publication
and it was duly published in 1793. However,
in October 1794 a royal rescript accused
Kant of having abused his philosophy for
the purpose of ‘distorting and disparaging
several principal and fundamental doctrines
of Holy Scripture and of Christianity’ includ-
ing within this book. Further, Kant was
enjoined not to publish further on this area
and, while defending his book from these
accusations, Kant agreed to comply with this
directive until King Frederick William II died
in November 1797 after which Kant deemed
himself released from the rescript and pub-
lished all the details of it in CF.
After being published in 1793 this work
quickly went through a series of reprints and
new editions and Kant adds a series of addi-
tional notes to the second edition of 1794 and
a new preface. In addition to the two prefaces,
it is divided into four parts. In the ‘Preface’ to
the first edition, Kant declares that morality
is complete so long as it is based only on free-
dom and the moral law so that it does not
need religion for these purposes. However,
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while morality needs nothing further for the
ground of its maxims it has a necessary refer-
ence to an ‘end’ in terms of its consequences.
What is meant by this is that the result of our
conduct is not something indifferent to us
and he refers again to the notion of the high-
est good mentioned in the Dialectic of CPrR.
This notion of the ‘highest good’ is referred
to as a special point of unification for our
ends (or as a ‘final end’) and related to the
question (prominent in the examples in G)
of the kind of world we would create. These
ideas are now connected (as they were in the
postulates of practical reason) to ‘religion’ or
‘the idea of a mighty moral lawgiver outside
the human being’ (R 6).
Having introduced the concept of reli-
gion, Kant proceeds to distinguish between
two kinds of theology, ‘biblical’ and ‘philo-
sophical’, though he does little here to make
clear the province of the former. The dis-
tinction is markedly introduced to discuss
the question of censorship and the need
for philosophical theology to be based and
judged on the criterion of reason alone. The
‘Preface’ to the second edition discusses the
pure religion of reason as something that
could be regarded as ‘part’ of revealed reli-
gion and as the ‘part’ the philosopher (who
‘abstracts’ from experience) is concerned
with. Kant also indicates in the ‘Preface’
that if we begin with a given historical reli-
gion it may well be possible to hold up frag-
ments of it in such a way that we can be led
back to the rational system of pure reason.
In making this claim, Kant also makes a dis-
tinction between ‘religion’ and ‘cult’ where
the latter has no reference to reason. Kant
also claims here that no special reference to
his moral system is needed to read the work
but only the standpoint of ‘common moral-
ity’ (though this surely means at least the
position of G part I).
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Kant’s Conception of Evil
The work is then generally presented as
concerned with the ‘philosophical doctrine
of religion’ and the first part concerns the
radical evil of human nature. This part opens
with the observation that the claim that the
world lies in evil is a very old complaint and
that the view that the world is progressing is
a much newer claim. A first determination of
evil follows shortly after. It is to the effect that
someone is evil in allowing the ‘interference’
of evil maxims. Kant discusses the inference
of an underlying evil maxim as the ground of
all particular evil conduct. This ground does
not lie in anything directly sensible but in a
specific kind of decision to allow the sensi-
ble sway over the intelligible. The conflict
mentioned at the opening of this part is then
reduced to a claim concerning whether we are
‘by nature’ (that is, in terms of the underlying
maxim of conduct) disposed to good or evil.
Kant goes on to look at the ‘original
predisposition’ to good in terms of three
headings, namely in relation to ‘animality’,
‘rationality’ and ‘personality’. In relation to
‘animality’, there is desire for self-preserva-
tion, propagation of the species and com-
munity with others. Each of these is shown
to have vices concomitant to them (gluttony,
lust and wild lawlessness, all termed ‘bes-
tial’ vices). The predispositions to humanity
involve a comparison that involves reason
(so are distinct from the predispositions to
animality). Here Kant discusses a kind of
self-love that involves an inclination to gain
worth in the opinion of others and describes
this as originally being a desire for equal
worth that becomes distorted into a striving
for ascendancy and produces the ‘diabolical’
vices of envy, ingratitude and joy in others’
misfortune. Finally, the predisposition to per-
sonality is the only really purely good one as
62
it requires respect for the moral law as a sole
incentive of choice and so is effectively iden-
tical to personality itself.
Kant then moves on to talking about the
‘propensity’ to evil where ‘propensity’ is
taken to mean a subjective ground of the
possibility of an inclination and is distin-
guished from a predisposition in the sense
that it can be understood as freely adopted.
Kant distinguishes three different levels of a
propensity to evil in terms of frailty, impu-
rity and depravity where the last means a
determination to adopt evil maxims. After
considering this area, Kant reaches the con-
clusion that the human being is, by nature,
evil and further substantiates this by refer-
ence to the inductive reference spoken of
earlier. The basis of this evil is the subor-
dination of intelligible incentives to sensi-
ble ones. Given the deep-rooted nature of
this failing, there is a sense to thinking of
the propensity to evil as something inher-
ited. The reason for presenting it this way
is that the origin of a free movement can-
not be explicated. Kant further presents this
point as the basis of the view that we were
originally tempted by an evil spirit. The first
part then closes with a ‘general remark’ (the
first of four) that concerns the restoration of
power to the original predisposition to good
(or effects of grace). Here Kant discusses the
rational basis of the claim that there remains
a ‘germ’ of goodness in our evil nature but
that a ‘revolution’ in our mode of thought
is necessary in order to restore the original
predisposition to goodness. This requires
a ‘decision’ to reverse the supreme ground
of our maxims and examples of good peo-
ple are a helpful way to achieve this. The
‘remark’ concludes with another distinction
between types of religion with moral reli-
gion compared to cult again and the former
enjoining that we do all in our power to be

good while the latter is depicted as requiring
morally unnecessary measures.
The second part of the work concerns the
battle between the good and evil principles
and focuses on the need to view our moral
situation as consisting in such a fight. Kant
again points out that natural inclinations
are, in themselves, good and, in doing so,
contrasts his approach to that of the Stoics.
In contrast to them, Kant sides with the
Christian view that there is an evil spirit that
it is necessary to engage in combat. After
mentioning this idea, Kant discusses the per-
sonified idea of the good principle and says
it is our duty to elevate ourselves to the ideal
of moral perfection, an act that amounts, on
his view, to a practical faith in the ‘Son of
God’ (R 62). The prototype of such a ‘Son’
resides only in reason and the use of this
ideal is defended by means of a discussion of
the procedure of formulating a ‘schematism
of analogy’.
Kant also considers a series of ‘difficulties’
that stand in the way of us realizing the idea
of a humanity that could be well-pleasing to
God. The first difficulty concerns the problem
of adopting the position of a ‘new man’ who
has become converted to the law when all our
maxims appear at root to be corrupted. This
difficulty resides in our necessarily temporal
means of representing our moral state but can
be met by imagining God’s representation as
viewing not our moment-by-moment state
but rather the totality of our disposition. The
second difficulty concerns our moral happi-
ness, i.e. what assurance we have of attaining
a constant disposition that always advances
in goodness. In relation to this problem, Kant
sets out a representation of our general con-
duct in life as a motivation for our ability
to either stay constant or to seek to become
so. The third, and most important, difficulty
concerns how we wipe out the original debt
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of having started out from evil for which we
surely continue to deserve punishment. In
response to this, Kant argues that the conver-
sion to the moral law is not a separate act
from the punishment for the evil disposition
which previously reigned and that the pure
disposition that thus emerges bears as vicari-
ous substitute the debt of the original evil.
This idea involves taking the pure disposition
to be personified as the ‘Son of God’ earlier
mentioned. The struggle of the good and
the evil dispositions is also presented in this
part through a symbolic interpretation of the
notion of Satan presented in the Scriptures
and the struggle of this with Christ, includ-
ing a symbolic interpretation of the story
of the virgin birth (through a notion of pre-
­formation [R 80n.]).
The discussion of Christ involves the
presentation of moral religion irrupting in
the presence of cults. The ‘general remark’
that closes the second part concerns mira-
cles which are presented as something with
which moral religion is adorned on its first
appearance. The point is made that rational
human beings do not subscribe to the view
that miracles can occur now, even if they do
not rule out their possibility as such in the-
ory. The point is also made that any apparent
message from God can always be judged in
terms of its accord with moral teaching.
A Society of Virtue
The third part concerns the manner in which
the good principle could be victorious over
the evil one. This part opens by tracing the
presence of what was termed in the first
part as ‘diabolical vices’ and which are now
termed ‘passions’ in human sociality. In
response to this, the picture is now drawn of
the establishment of a society in accordance
with virtue.
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The precondition of such a society ever
existing is, as Kant is careful to point out, a
political community but the society of virtue
has a distinct principle of its own. However,
there is an analogy between these types of
community so that Kant feels he can discuss
the ‘ethical state of nature’ even though he
rules out the view that we could leave this by
political means. In discussing how to leave
this ethical state of nature, Kant introduces a
new conception of the ‘highest good’ that is
different from the one that was referred to in
the first part of the work (as the earlier con-
ception drew entirely on the view of CPrR).
This new sense of the ‘highest good’ is an
idea of reason as a common end of human-
ity and is pictured as the formation of the
ethical community. However, the point of
origin of the laws of this ethical community
is not presented (as was the case with the
kingdom of ends of G) as arising purely from
humanity itself but instead as having, as its
law-giver, God as ‘moral ruler of the world’
(R  99). Having made this point, Kant pro-
ceeds to convert his conception of a moral
community into a form of church and thus
gives next a rational ecclesiology.
Kant’s Ecclesiology
The notion of the church is differentiated
between an invisible one and a visible one.
The invisible church is the mere idea of the
union of all ethical human beings under a
divine world-governance while the visible
church is the ‘actual’ union in accord with
such an idea. Kant then sets out the marks
of such a church in accordance with the
Table of Categories of CPR, describing it as
universal in quantity, pure in quality, having
free relations and an unchanging modality
of constitution. However, as Kant goes on to
discuss, every ‘visible’ church has its basis in
64
some type of ‘revealed’ (or, as he now terms
it, ‘historical’) faith rather than simply being
grounded on pure religious faith as drawn
from reason. In discussing this point, Kant
describes again the distinction between reli-
gion and cult and now distinguishes the latter
as dependent on the forms of historical rev-
elation at the cost of a priori reason. Further,
the type of ‘church’ that can be formed as a
cult is here described as one that depends on
‘temples’ (outward forms of public service)
and ‘priests’ (who practice piety rather than
pure moral religion). Kant also argues that
the majority of people have no sense of ‘reli-
gion’ but only of statutory faith (and are thus
engaged in ‘cults’).
Kant’s Hermeneutics
At this point Kant also explicitly presents his
hermeneutic principles for the interpretation
of Scripture which has, as he freely admits,
a ‘forced’ character since it always views
its text in light of pure moral demands due
to the claim that the reading of these texts
should always have in view making human
beings better. This moral improvement is the
true end of the religion of reason and is the
key to Kant’s exegesis of Scripture.
By contrast to this hermeneutic approach
is set the figure of a scriptural scholar whose
task is mainly to preserve the authority
of a church but who should really have a
broad culture at hand. The latter is clearly
intended to be guided by the former and
both are opposed to the view of one who
reads Scripture according to the dictates of
‘feeling’.
The Antinomy of Faith
Kant next looks at the question of the gradual
transition of ecclesiastical faith towards pure

religious faith and, in the course of doing
so, explores an antinomy. This is between
a notion of faith that finds satisfaction by
means of reparation for guilt on the one
hand and faith in the ability to become well-
pleasing to God by future good conduct on
the other. The first is presented as including
the problem that if reparation depends only
on faith then it would appear to make good
conduct unnecessary. But the second, by con-
trast, appears to make the conversion to the
moral law something available to someone
who is depraved without making clear how
this can be possible. So there appears a dif-
ficulty either way in reconciling faith and
good works (the classic argument between
Protestant and Catholic Christians). In
responding to this antinomy, Kant points out
that faith alone is something only necessary
in a theoretical sense while the need for good
works is practically required. Ecclesiastical
faith begins from historical faith alone but
this is only a vehicle for the promotion of
rational faith. The faith that resides in such
ecclesiastical forms alone tends toward
superstition and takes the ideal of humanity
as presented in the ‘Son of God’ as an empiri-
cal historical appearance. However, the sense
of the ‘Son of God’ that is religiously required
cannot be the reference to an appearance of
the senses but must rather be to the proto-
type of our reason and faith in that it must
be the same as the faith in our ability to act
in accord with such an ideal (which is good
works). So the antinomy is only an appar-
ent one. The point raised from this antinomy
is the need to free faith from empirical his-
torical determination so that it can become
purely rational.
Kant next gives an historical sketch of the
gradual arrival of pure religion which is con-
centrated only on one religion, namely that
which he takes to have always included as
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Key Works
a possibility in itself the reference to pure
rational faith, and this is Christianity. Prior
to giving his ‘history’ of Christianity however,
Kant first describes the ‘Jewish faith’, which
he states is ‘not a religion at all’ but a forma-
tion of a political community (R 125). Even
the Ten Commandments are here described
as having only been given to help the forma-
tion of a political community and the lack of
reference of Judaism to a future life is taken
as further evidence of its lack of religious
character. Christianity is presented as based
on a total abandonment of Judaism and as
introducing a pure moral religion, which is
supported by means of some of Kant’s rather
‘forced’ exegesis of the New Testament.
However, the history of Christianity is
admitted to include little that is uplifting
with Kant describing in deprecatory terms
the Great Schism between East and West and
concluding with an epigraph from Lucretius
concerning the evil deeds of religion. So it is
really the Christian present that Kant uses as
a model, not its historical record.
The ‘general remark’ with which the third
part closes concerns mysteries and Kant
points out that there is no way of determin-
ing objectively whether mysteries exist but
even the Trinity is here discussed only in
practical terms and not in theoretical ones.
However, this practical idea of the Trinity
is presented as the basis of a mystery in the
sense that it gives us something practically
that we can make no sense of theoretically
and the practical sense of it is determined in
three respects. Firstly, by means of the idea of
the ‘call’ of us to become members of a virtu-
ous community, based on the mystery of how
we can have moral powers at all, something
that refers us to God as creator. Secondly, in
terms of the mystery of satisfaction, namely
of how we can find reparation for our evil,
something that we earlier saw involved the
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notion of vicarious substitution or God as
‘Son’. Thirdly, the mystery of election, of how
we can attain a state of being well-pleasing
to God, which refers to the sense of God as
Holy Spirit.
Illusory Religion
The fourth and final part of the work dis-
cusses false religion or ‘priestcraft’. In begin-
ning this section, Kant again refers to the
distinction between visible and invisible
church and speaks about the form of the
former as including within it much that is
inessential to pure religion. In further pre-
senting this contrast, Kant speaks about ‘nat-
ural’ religion as something that is apparent
to reason and suggests that such could also
be spoken of as ‘revealed’ if by this is meant
that its formulas appear through the prism of
a chosen historical form. Such ‘natural’ reli-
gion is a pure practical concept of reason and
Kant presents Christianity as including it, by
means, once again, of his peculiar method of
biblical hermeneutics.
By contrast to this ‘natural’ religion, Kant
presents a ‘learned’ religion as one that
requires dogmas that are not apparent to
reason and which he relates as dependent on
a certain history. The ‘counterfeit’ service of
religion is one that requires unconditional
faith in such dogmas and is, in its form, ‘slav-
ish’. Such religion is full of ‘delusion’ where
a delusion involves mistaking a certain kind
of representation of a thing as equivalent to
the possession of the thing. Such delusion is
discussed in terms of anthropomorphism and
distinguished from rational faith as concerned
with outward performances rather than with
the disposition of the heart towards good
works. The view that performance of cult
acts is in itself pleasing to God is declared
the basis of cults and to be a superstition.
66
So far does Kant go in this analysis that he
renders equivalent the practices of a shaman
and the way of life of some contemporary
‘Christians’ (R 176). Such a service is further
described as a form of fetishism and ‘priest-
craft’ to be fetish-service.
The ‘general remark’ at the end of this
section concerns ‘means of grace’ and Kant
maintains the point here that the only means
in our power to attain grace is endeavouring
to improve our moral nature. Faith in mira-
cles, mysteries and means of grace, consid-
ered theoretically, are all forms of delusory
faith. Similarly, prayer, viewed just as a ritual,
is a superstitious delusion and would, viewed
correctly, be only a means to enliven our aim
towards acts that would be ‘well-pleasing’ to
God. Church-going, likewise, as an external
worship, has no direct use but should only
be seen as a means of the community gener-
ally working towards moral progress. Kant’s
general message is summarized by the final
sentence in which he argues that we should
not attempt to move from grace to virtue but
rather from virtue to grace.
TOWARD PERPETUAL PEACE (PP)
This work was first published in 1795, the
year Prussia signed the Peace of Basel with
France but refers, in its title, to a long-stand-
ing debate on the nature of peace. It is one
of Kant’s most-cited writings outside the area
of philosophy, having been used to main-
tain quite a variety of positions in the area
of International Relations theory. It is some-
what elaborately structured, despite its rela-
tive brevity. The main parts of the work are
presented as a division of two sections but to
these Kant added two supplements and an
appendix. The work is also formulated in a

style that mimics the form of treaties between
states.
The work opens with Kant making a refer-
ence to the expression ‘perpetual peace’ that
accompanied a picture of a graveyard on a
Dutch innkeeper’s signboard. Awareness of a
censorial climate is also here indicated with
Kant stating that the attitude of the worldly-
wise statesman towards the philosopher is
often one of taking the latter to be irrelevant
with Kant adding that, if this view is con-
sistently held, then there can be no occasion
for viewing philosophical works as posing a
danger to the state.
The Preliminary Articles
After this sally of an introduction, the first
section presents six preliminary articles
for perpetual peace among states, each of
which is given some justification. They are:
firstly, treaties of peace should include no
secret reservations preparing for war; no
independently existing state can be acquired
by another; standing armies should in time
be abolished; national debts should not be
contracted with regard to states’ external
affairs; states shall not forcibly intervene in
each ­other’s constitutions and government;
in cases of war states shall not employ meth-
ods that would make mutual trust impossible
during a future peace.
Each of the articles includes a paragraph
justifying its argument and Kant later divides
the preliminary articles indicating that some
of them are strict and should be enforced at
once while others, by contrast, can be post-
poned being put into effect. The ones viewed
by him as holding strictly are the first, fifth
and sixth articles (concerning secret reserva-
tions, non-interference in other states’ con-
stitutions and not using methods that would
make mutual trust possible later).
67
Key Works
However, while half of the preliminary
articles are not strict, Kant is firm in the
view that this does not entail that they could
be postponed for good. This leads Kant to
also insert a lengthy note on the notion of
‘permissive law’, which is here directed ‘only
to the future way of acquiring a right’ but
which explains his view of the second arti-
cle (concerning inheritance of another state)
more than his views of articles three and four
(concerning standing armies and national
debt).
The Definitive Articles
The second section contains three defini-
tive articles for perpetual peace and is intro-
duced by a statement concerning the need to
supersede the state of nature and to establish
a state of peace. Another lengthy footnote
discusses the notion of a rightful constitu-
tion, distinguishing between being in accord
with the right of citizens of a state, a right of
nations and the right of citizens of the world.
The three definitive articles are discussed
at considerably more length than the pre-
liminary ones and are clearly taken by Kant
to be much more important. The first article
declares that the civil constitution in every
state shall be republican. The nature of such
a state is then defined through discussion
of the freedom of the members of a soci-
ety as individuals, their dependence on a
single common legislation (as citizens) and
on the law of their equality (as subjects). A
footnote is then introduced that describes
rightful freedom in terms of being governed
by external laws to which I could have
consented.
The connection of the republican constitu-
tion to the goal of perpetual peace is argued
to be that this constitution ensures that a peo-
ple will be less willing to start a war of which
KEY WORKS
they would themselves have to bear the hard-
ships. Kant contrasts a republican constitu-
tion with a ‘democratic’ one though he clearly
thinks of the latter in terms of ancient models
of democracy and not in terms of representa-
tive government. Republicanism is identified
here with a separation of executive power
from legislative power and contrasted with
despotism in which the laws are effectively
decrees of a private purpose rather than laws
of a public will. Non-representative govern-
ments are taken by Kant to be wholly mate-
rial and without form.
The second definitive article declares that
the right of nations shall be based on feder-
alism and includes an extended comparison
between the formation of a rightful state from
the state of nature and the existing antagonis-
tic relations between states. The prosecution
of war is something that needs to be over-
come and the formation of a pacific league
is taken to be the best means to achieve this.
The league is distinguished from a state and
includes no provision for public laws of its
own. Kant appears here to prefer a state of
nations to the pacific league but to advocate
the latter as more likely to be adopted.
The third definitive article describes cos-
mopolitan right as limited to conditions of
universal hospitality. Hospitality is here
defined as the right a foreigner has not to
be treated with hostility on landing in a pol-
ity not his own. This notion of hospitality is
hence treated as a right to visit and to seek
commerce. However, this view is contrasted
with the colonial behaviour of European pow-
ers, which is roundly condemned, with some
sympathy evinced for the Japanese exclusion
of foreigners. It is in the context of the dis-
cussion of this article that Kant makes the
key claim that a violation of right anywhere
is now felt everywhere and that this ensures
that cosmopolitan right is a ‘supplement’ to
68
the unwritten code of the rights of states and
nations.
After the statement of the third defini-
tive article, Kant introduces the first of two
‘supplements’ to the treatise, which concerns
what he terms a ‘guarantee’ of perpetual
peace. This ‘guarantee’ focuses on a discus-
sion of providence and is connected to Kant’s
account of history in UH. The sense of ‘provi-
dence’ invoked here is distinguished from the
religious one. Kant presents it in naturalistic
terms but the reference to ‘nature’ is itself to
be understood in a practical and not a theo-
retical sense.
Kant focuses on the way that human
beings have spread to every corner of the
earth, even into inhospitable regions and
connects this to the need for lawful relations
between peoples in order to prevent war. The
suggestion, in anticipation of Hegel, made
here is that there are certain ends that are
effectively prosecuted even when we have
not wished them. So, war forces constraint
on public laws even if we would not wish to
be governed by them. Even those who act in
ways that are exclusively self-seeking require
a state in order to organize their affairs so
that even a nation of devils would form one
(assuming they had understanding). The
point here is that it does not require any
desire for moral improvement to see the
need for a state but that there are mecha-
nisms of action that bring it about regardless
of our wishes or ends. Similarly, Kant argues
that the distinction of peoples into separate
states is preferable to a universal despotism
and this separation is enforced by distinction
of languages and religion. The spirit of com-
merce is also upheld as the best means for
ensuring that there is peace.
The second ‘supplement’ contains a ‘secret
article’ for perpetual peace to the effect that
the maxims of philosophers concerning the

conditions for public peace should be con-
sulted by states that are readying for war. The
reason this ‘guarantee’ is presented as ‘secret’
is so that states need not feel that they need
to take advice from their subjects as a ‘pub-
lic’ matter. Kant stresses here the need to give
philosophers a hearing in addition to lawyers
to whom states have tended to refer.
The ‘appendix’ that closes the treatise is
divided into two sections. The first concerns
the grounds for disagreement between mor-
als and politics when it comes to perpetual
peace. Politics is here distinguished between
the view of it that emerges from considera-
tion of right (which should not conflict with
morals) and that which comes from a doc-
trine of prudence (which may well come into
conflict with morals).
Kant goes on to look at the attitude of those
who take it that human beings will never be
able to adopt ends leading to the goal of per-
petual peace. The reason is taken to be that
power will not allow laws to be prescribed
to it. In response Kant invokes the figure of
a moral politician who would try to reform
the practices of state in conformity with the
concept of right. However, the practice that
is adopted by those who oppose the views
of the moral politician are then described
and the core of them taken to be ‘deal[ing]
in machinations’ (PP 373). The maxims of
such dealings are then summarized as three-
fold: seize favourable opportunities for tak-
ing possession; always deny the guilt is your
own; divide and rule. These maxims are iden-
tified as those of an immoral doctrine of pru-
dence and as necessarily requiring to be held
in secret. In reply to them, Kant distinguishes
between basing practical reason on material
principles or on formal ones with the latter
formulated in accord with the categorical
imperative (PP 377). The uncertainty attach-
ing to all maxims of prudence is alleged and
69
Key Works
basing state conduct on principles of happi-
ness and welfare condemned. Kant argues for
the need for politics to be governed by right
and to abandon the standpoint of prudence.
The second part of the appendix describes
the agreement of politics with morals in
accord with the transcendental concept of
public right and opens with Kant abstracting
from the matter of public right in order to
arrive at the form of publicity. By this means,
Kant arrives at the transcendental formula
of public right which is that all actions
relating to the rights of others are wrong if
their maxim is incompatible with publicity
(PP 381). This maxim is also argued to be not
merely ethical but also juridical. Any maxim
that has to be kept secret to be successful
must involve injustice.
The consequences of this formula are then
followed through the three areas of the right
of a state, the right of nations and cosmo-
politan right. In regard to the right of a state,
Kant attacks the view that there could be a
‘right’ to rebellion since, if the maxims in
favour of rebellion were publicly formulated,
they could not be successful. With regard
to the rights of nations, Kant formulates a
more intricate account giving three separate
examples, which concern international acts
of promising, acts of states operating with
regard to the divide and rule formula and
the attempt of larger states to incorporate
smaller states within themselves.
Cosmopolitan right is merely mentioned
but not discussed since Kant claims the max-
ims of it would be easy to formulate and
evaluate. Kant compares the spurious politics
that would try and avoid the consequences
that attach to the formula of publicity to the
maxims of Jesuits. A further principle is then
added which is stated in an affirmative form
as if we adopt only maxims that require pub-
licity in order not to fail in their end then we
KEY WORKS
can be assured that such maxims must also
be in accord with the right of the public.
METAPHYSICS OF MORALS (MM)
This work was published in two separate parts
in 1797 as the first part, or Doctrine of Right,
was published first with the Doctrine of Virtue
following afterwards but the two parts have
always subsequently been treated as belonging
together in one work. The publication of this
work was the culmination of Kant’s practical
philosophy but it has only recently received
any serious attention in English-language
scholarship. Until recently, G received the
majority of attention without looking at the
book that G was meant to pave the way for.
The pioneering work of Mary Gregor took
many years to have influence but has recently
been supplemented by Mark Timmons and
Gary Banham,16 all of which have helped to
create a situation where this work has begun
to be seen as key to comprehending a number
of features of Kant’s view of ethics.
The ‘Preface’ to the work is really aimed
primarily at introducing the Doctrine of
Right. Kant here points out that the work
presented is not a comprehensive treat-
ment of right as that would have to include
a discussion of empirical variety and that
what is presented here are the metaphysi-
cal first principles. An explicit comparison
is also drawn between the method used in
the Doctrine of Right and that which guided
MFNS. Kant also points out that the earlier
parts of the Doctrine of Right are worked
over much more thoroughly than the later
parts and concludes with a table of divisions
of the Doctrine of Right.
There next follow two introductions, one
to the metaphysics of morals as a whole and
70
one specific to the Doctrine of Right. The gen-
eral introduction to the metaphysics of mor-
als as a whole distinguishes the method by
which metaphysics relates to natural science
from how it relates to morals. While natu-
ral science mixes a priori principles together
with empirical ones the doctrine of morals
requires that laws be seen to be a priori, espe-
cially in the sense of being necessary.
Kant points out that if the doctrine of mor-
als were essentially an exposition of happi-
ness, it would be absurd to expect to discern
a priori principles. With regard to morals,
there is no necessary reference to experience
due to the fact that there may be no empirical
examples to hand and there is no necessary
reference to what experience can teach us.
Kant also refers to ‘principles of application’
of the higher universal principles indicating
that these involve bringing in references spe-
cific to the nature of human beings. Further,
the empirical counterpart of the metaphysics
of morals is stated to be moral anthropology
although this latter could only discuss what
conditions of human nature help or hinder
the fulfilment of the metaphysics of morals.
The laws with which the work is con-
cerned are moral laws or laws of freedom.
When these are considered as directed only
to external actions we have juridical laws
but if they also require consideration of the
determining grounds of action then they are
ethical laws. Kant describes a number of con-
cepts that are common to both parts of the
work and explicitly includes the categorical
imperative in this list. The difference between
the two parts of the work is explained by
means of the way the law relates to incen-
tives that are considered. When the law that
makes an action a duty is the only thing
allowed as an incentive then we are deal-
ing purely with ethics. But when another
ground additional to the law is taken to be

an incentive for action then we are on juridi-
cal ground. In fact, when we are considering
juridical action, it is not necessary that the
law even be taken as part of your motivation
in acting in accordance with it. All duties,
as duties, are presented as part of ethics but
only because all juridical duties are indirectly
ethical.
Kant expanded the introduction to the
Doctrine of Right when the second edition
of the work appeared in 1798. The first part
of the introduction is, however, more fre-
quently referred to than the additional mate-
rial added. Here Kant addresses the question
of what right is by describing it as the ‘sum
of conditions under which the choice of one
can be united with the choice of another in
accordance with a universal law of freedom’
(MM 230). After stating this general account
of what right consists in Kant proceeds to
state the universal (or supreme) principle of
right, which says an action is right if it can
coexist with everyone’s freedom in accord-
ance with the universal law. If something that
can so coexist is hindered by another then
the one who so hinders it does a wrong. On
this basis, Kant presents right as connected
with an authorization to use coercion since if
whatever hinders that which is right is wrong
then the former, in so hindering the latter, cre-
ates a state that needs to be remedied and this
is an external state since right governs that
which is external. So the external state has
to be set back into equilibrium and this can
be achieved by removing the check. Hence
to coerce someone to cease acting wrongly
is itself right.
The concept of right is also described as
‘the possibility of connecting universal recip-
rocal coercion with the freedom of everyone’
(MM 232). Kant describes ‘strict’ right as
that which is not mixed with anything ethi-
cal and states that such strict right requires
71
Key Works
only external grounds for determining choice
and on this ground right and the authoriza-
tion to use coercion are presented as identical
to each other. After making this claim, Kant
includes an extended analogical connection
of right to mathematics and physics.
Kant presents the second part of the intro-
duction as an ‘appendix’ though it is much
longer than the first part. Here Kant first
presents definitions of some terms and then
gives a general division of the duties of right.
This general division includes some state-
ments from Ulpian that have been deemed
significant by both Höffe and Byrd and
Hruschka.17
Kant next explicates freedom as the only
original or ‘innate’ right belonging to all by
virtue of their very humanity. The introduc-
tion concludes with a number of elaborate
accounts of the division of the work, which
explain its division through a distinction
of types of duty, types of obligation and in
terms of architectonic.
Private Right
The Doctrine of Right is itself divided into
two major parts; one part concerned with
‘private’ right and the other with ‘public’
right. The discussion of private right opens
with a discussion of what it means to have
something external as one’s own. This ini-
tially concerns the notion of ‘possession’ and
Kant opens by distinguishing between ‘intel-
ligible’ and ‘empirical’ possession, which
enables him to understand the possibility of
possession that does not require holding the
thing in question physically. From this slen-
der basis, Kant moves on to distinguishing
between types of possession, which requires
distinction of different ‘external objects’ that
can be possessed. The three types indicated
are corporeal things, another’s choice and
KEY WORKS
another’s status. Included under the second
heading is someone’s promise to act in certain
ways and in the latter relations to others, such
as the relation to a wife, a child or a servant.
The general notion of external objects that
are possessed involves a sense that one would
be wronged by being disturbed in one’s pos-
session even though one does not hold it. So
it is intelligible possession that poses the key
question for Kant and it is only with regard
to such that we are dealing with synthetic a
priori judgments (empirical possession being
merely analytic).
From this start, Kant states a ‘postulate’
of practical reason with regard to rights that
asserts the possibility of intelligible possession
on the grounds of the view that it would be
contrary to right that objects of choice should
belong to no one. The brief argument given
for this postulate concerns the consistency of
external freedom with itself. The ground for
this claim is that we require removal of con-
ditions of intuition with the practical princi-
ples. This is required to be able to uncover
the basis of claims to possession in a general
sense and is in accord with the procedure of
the typic in CPrR. To relate the notion of intel-
ligible possession to objects of experience, we
have to apply it not to the concept of ‘hold-
ing’ but only to that of ‘having’ and we con-
nect this concept to the sense of externality
where something is distinct from us. At this
point, Kant introduces an antinomy concern-
ing possession in view of the conflict between
those who take it to be possible to have some-
thing external as one’s own even though it is
not held by one and those who deny this pos-
sibility. Kant now resolves this antinomy by
showing that the claim to validity here is right
if we mean intelligible possession and wrong
if we mean empirical possession.
Having given this statement of the basis of
intelligible possession, Kant goes on to claim
72
that the possibility of this form of possession
requires something further to be given real-
ity. This further element is the existence of
a rightful condition, which means the exist-
ence of a civil society. The reason for this is
that without the existence of the civil condi-
tion there is lack of assurance of the mutu-
ality of respect for possession. A unilateral
will cannot produce this mutuality, only an
omnilateral will can do so. Outside the realm
of the civil constitution, the rightful claim to
possession does still exist, however, and with
it comes the authorization to coerce others to
respect such a claim even without the exist-
ence of the civil power. What we have in such
conditions is a ‘provisionally rightful’ posses-
sion while possession in a civil condition is
conclusively rightful possession.
Kant’s initial argument concerned how
to have something external as one’s own
and the next stage examines how to acquire
something external in the first place. In
explicating this second point, Kant uses the
postulate of practical reason to show that
bringing something under one’s control in
order to use it has to be combined with
an act of will where the latter has to con-
form to the structure of a possible united
(or omnilateral) will. Acquiring something
as one’s own involves a matter, a form and
a basis. The matter of the object concerns
the kind of thing that can be acquired and
this is either the thing as a substance, anoth-
er’s performance of an action (causality) or
the status of another person (coexistence),
which shows that matter of the object is
connected to the categories of relation. The
form of what can be acquired divides the
rights in question to either right to a thing,
right against a person and right to a per-
son similar to a right to a thing. Finally, the
basis of the acquisition is given unilaterally,
bilaterally or omnilaterally.

After making these divisions, Kant next
looks at the three forms of right, beginning
with the right to a thing that leads us to
the notion of property right. The right to a
thing is a right to the private use of some-
thing even though the original possession
of it would have been common. This basis
of the original right is not directly over the
thing itself but rather to the possession of
the right to claim the thing as distinct from
others having such a right. Kant proceeds
to give an a priori genesis of such property
rights by describing original acquisition as
involving land (a claim that, again, invokes
the postulate of practical reason). The pos-
sibility of such possession is related to the
notion of an original community where this
notion refers not to a primitive condition but
rather to an a priori claim. What Kant really
means by this is that the original community
is effectively to be understood as the possi-
ble civil condition under which the right is
conclusively authorized. However, although
such actual conclusive authorization requires
the civil condition, it is the mere idea of the
possibility of such that is sufficient to act as
justification of possession and is hence the
ground, in private right, for first possession
of land. Provisional right to hold property
is justified according to a permissive law of
reason on which something that will be right
if actual can be grounded in terms of its mere
possibility. There is much detailed investiga-
tion of this opening section of the Doctrine
of Right.18
The next form of right, the right against
a person, is dealt with under the heading of
contract right. Unlike property right, this
is not an original right and is not acquired
by another acting in a way that is wrong. It
requires rather an act of united choice of (at
least) two whereby something passes from
one to the other. Contract requires, in Kant’s
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Key Works
view, preparatory and constitutive acts of
choice. The preparatory rightful acts are the
manner of negotiating which refer to means
of offering something and means of assent-
ing to the offering. By contrast, the consti-
tutive elements are the means by which the
conclusion of the transfer is brought about
and involve promising and accepting. Before
a promise of transfer can be made, it is first
necessary to establish that what is promised
is something that is desired. But the act of
transfer only takes place through the uniting
of the will of both. The problem that has to
be addressed in contract concerns how the
united will of both is to be manifested when
temporally they make distinct and distin-
guishable acts.
In reply to this problem, Kant introduces
a ‘transcendental deduction’, which again
requires the acts involved in the transfer to
be seen as intelligible rather than empirical.
What is acquired is the causality of another’s
choice or another’s promise and involves
tacit acquiescence in a law of continuity
(MM 274). The contract is only honoured
when the thing in question is delivered.
The third kind of right, the right to a per-
son akin to a right to a thing, is divided into
three separate parts but governs what Kant
generally terms ‘domestic right’. This area
is not governed just by a deed on one’s own
initiative as property right was and nor is it
just a contract but involves rather the right of
humanity in our own person and is governed
by what is termed a ‘natural permissive law’
and concerns ‘most personal’ rights (MM
276–277). The three-fold division of the area
is between marriage right, parental right and
the right of a head of a household.
In discussing marriage right, Kant distin-
guishes natural sexual union from such union
in accordance with law and in the process
dismisses Catholic natural law arguments,
KEY WORKS
which view marriage right as grounded on
procreation alone. The connection between
the right to a person and the right to a thing
is made in the case of marriage right by the
way in which sexual union is understood as
divided between animal union and lawful
union. Merely sensual or ‘animal’ union is
pursued exclusively for the sake of enjoy-
ment and Kant views this as taking the
other merely to be a thing for the sake of
one’s pleasure. This purely sensuous relation
is transformed if there is an act of mutual
acquisition as this enables recognition of
the personality of each to be incorporated
into the act of union. On these grounds,
Kant somewhat strictly views sexual union
as only permissible under the conditions
of marriage. Not only is this so but Kant’s
conception of the sexual union as a lawful
transformation of a ‘natural’ sexual urge
rules out extension of marriage beyond het-
erosexual union although the strict resources
of his argument are hardly sufficient to sus-
tain this. The simple leaving of one partner
of a marriage is also ruled out by Kant on
the basis that, since we are dealing with a
right to a person akin to that to a thing,
either partner could retrieve the other and
bring them back under control, just as they
could with a thing. This seems to involve an
overextension of his analogy. Formally, the
marriage partners are taken to be equal in
their possession of each other though this
does not prevent Kant from assuming that
the husband could be ‘master’ of the wife
on the grounds of a greater capacity to pro-
mote the common interest of the household
(MM 279). Finally, despite parting from the
Catholic tradition of assuming procreation
to be the essential end of marriage, Kant
views a marriage which involves tacit or
expressed wish to avoid sexual union as only
a simulated marriage.
74
Parental right follows next as emerging
from the procreation allowed for as a ‘natu-
ral’ element of marriage right. Children are
related to as other persons over whom there
is right that is akin to the right to a thing.
This ‘right’ over the children is not without
obligation since the child has the right to
be cared for until it is able to care for itself.
Since the child is a person who has emerged
from acts of the parents to which the child
did not consent, the obligation of the parents
to the child is part of the condition of pro-
duction of the child and is hence original. On
these grounds, Kant has a simple argument
against infanticide.
The obligations of the parents to the
child encompass the education of the child
both pragmatically and morally and while
the child is still in its minority they have no
obligation with which they can charge him
other than the duty of gratitude, which is
not a matter of right. The right held over the
child, as a right over a person, is not aliena-
ble although, as in the case of marriage right,
the parent has the right to retrieve the child
should the child run away. Contemporary
work on children’s rights in a Kantian vein
has moved away from the strictly paternalist
form Kant himself gave it and can be seen in
the work of Onora O’Neill.19
The final part of domestic right concerns
the right of a head of the household and this
is the briefest part of Kant’s discussion. It
covers the kind of right that is at work in the
holding of domestic servants which involves
a contract between the head of the household
and free persons who may be employed either
to help with the children or in the running
of the household. Again, as with the exam-
ples of marriage right and parental right,
Kant assumes that this involves the right to
recover the servant if they depart from the
possession of the head without the head’s

permission. However, despite this somewhat
alarming provision, Kant is clear that serv-
ants are not owned by the head of the house-
hold and so he distinguishes the servant’s
place from that of either a slave or a serf.
Contract is required to govern the relation
and its frame must be temporally limited.
This part of Kant’s discussion of domestic
right has not received general discussion
although, given that the relations discussed
persist, albeit altered in certain ways, there
are certainly grounds for thinking it needs to
be as extensively responded to as the other
elements of domestic right have been.
After the discussion of domestic right,
Kant returns to the account of contract right
and provides a general division of its possi-
bilities in relation to unilateral or gratuitous
contracts (which include acts of lending and
gifting), mutual acquisition (including such
alienation as buying and selling and con-
tracts of letting and hiring) and those which
guarantee what belongs to someone (as when
we vouch for something). These forms of
division of contract right are organized in a
table.
Kant next discusses the nature of money
distinguishing the nominal definition of it as
a means of alienation from the real definition
as the means of exchanging industriousness.
This account of money assumes that money
is something distinct from bank notes and
takes it rather to be something that it has
taken a great deal of industry to produce.
The empirical concept of money is that which
determines the price of things but Kant fol-
lows Adam Smith in seeing its ‘intellectual
concept’ to involve reference to industry.
After discussing money, Kant looks at the
nature of books in order to discuss the ques-
tion of the authorization of their publication.
The question of such authorization arises as
the publisher does not present discourses of
75
Key Works
his own to the public but discourses of the
author and so has to have the authority of
the author to present them to the public. On
these grounds, Kant indicates a basis in right
for authorization of copyright and indicates
objections to such right are based on treating
the produced object as if it were independ-
ent of its producer. Hence those who violate
this right are not respecting the personality
expressed in the thing.
Kant next treats the topic of ‘ideal acqui-
sition’ by which he means something that
involves no causality in time and states that
such forms of acquisition are at issue when
we are dealing with prolonged possession,
inheritance and merit after one’s death (repu-
tation). The first of these involves the claim
that is made when someone has long laid
undisputed control over something and dis-
covers eventually that another has the status
of being its true owner. In response, Kant
argues that without continuity of possession
being exerted the claim to ownership even-
tually lapses. Inheritance involves transfer
of possession to someone else by virtue of
cessation of empirical existence and willing
of possession after this has occurred. Since,
however, the transfer requires the cessation
of the original owner, there is a sense in
which this is not a real transfer but is an ideal
one and Kant justifies its possibility outside
the civil condition on the grounds of tacit
consent to the inheritance. The question of
reputation after death is treated as an innate
external possession although it is ideal since
it is independent of the one who holds it. As
it is independent of the actuality of the per-
son in question, it is has to be taken to be a
right held by the person in their noumenal
sense.
The final part of the discussion of pri-
vate right concerns acquisition that depends
on the decision of a public court of justice.
KEY WORKS
This can still be treated under the heading
of private right on the grounds that the dis-
tribution of possession must have principles
that are in accord with the general grounds
of private right. So here Kant treats what
would be distributively right of itself in rela-
tion to judgment and suggests there are four
cases that need to be treated here. These are,
cases of contract to make gifts, contracts to
lend things, recovery of things and taking
oaths. The contract to make gifts is indicated
to require that only a reservation expressly
made can prevent the gift being given. The
contract to lend something discusses risks of
damage to what is lent and in the case of the
state of nature it is assumed such risk must
be borne by the borrower whereas in the civil
condition, by contrast, it falls on the lender.
Recovery of something lost concerns what
right is held when something I had is discov-
ered by another who does not know of my
claim and Kant indicates that the reference
to the notion of a court regulates only the
means by which something comes to be held.
If the new owner took possession accord-
ing to general conditions of right then I can
have no further claim on the thing. Finally,
the discussion of oaths effectively rules out
requirements that people be taken to believe
in religions and tends to rule against oaths as
a means of ensuring truthfulness.
Public Right
Kant concludes the discussion of private
right by stating a postulate of public right to
the effect that since we cannot avoid living in
relation to others we ought to leave the state
of nature and enter a civil condition. This
opens the discussion of public right. The dis-
cussion of public right is divided into three
parts, discussing the right of a state, the right
of nations and cosmopolitan right and also
76
includes a lengthy appendix of second edi-
tion revisions and emendations. The three
parts are asymmetrical with the discussion
of the right of a state much longer and more
detailed than the second two parts.
Kant opens the discussion of public right
by describing it generally as a system of
laws which emerge from an omnilateral will
that, in a constitution, has laid down what
is right. The general term for this condition
is a civil condition and the totality of per-
sons in this condition are said to be in a state.
The point Kant makes in introducing this
notion is that it is not due to some experi-
ence of malevolence that we can say we need
the state. Rather, even a state of nature filled
with angels would require supersession since,
without the formation of a civil condition,
we would always be dependent on subjective
agreement concerning what is right. A state
of nature is a state of dispute concerning
right and lacks a conclusive judge.
The state is divided between three distinct
authorities: the sovereign (legislator), the
executive and the judicial authority. The leg-
islature is taken to be sovereign as based on
the omnilateral will of the people and is the
source of all right. The citizens of the state
have three attributes, they are free and can be
governed only by laws to which they could
have given their consent, they are possessed
of civil equality and they are independent in
holding their preservation only to the exist-
ence of the civil condition and are thus not
dependent on the favour of any particular
persons.
Citizens are such by being able to vote but,
in explicating this notion, Kant distinguishes
between active and passive citizens, including
under the latter heading apprentices, domes-
tic servants, minors and women. The general
heading is meant to refer to those who need
another to protect and defend them (which

explains even if it does not exculpate why
Kant places women in this category). This
discussion is problematic in more than one
way as Kant’s examples of who falls under
which heading are difficult to take seriously.
The majority of Kant’s discussion is, how-
ever, focused not on the account of citizens but
on the nature of the state. The authorities that
make the state up are compared to parts of a
syllogism and the ruler of the state is the one
who possesses executive authority. Kant hence
distinguishes the ruler from the sovereign as
the latter power is held by the legislature but
he does also indicate that the sovereign can
depose the ruler.
At this point, the discussion broadens into
an account of the effects that follow with
regard to rights from the nature of the civil
union. The sovereign is stated to have only
rights against his subjects and no duties that
he can be forced to fulfil. Even if the ruler
proceeds in a way that is contrary to law
this can only be met with complaints and
not resistance. The basic point Kant seems to
be making here is that the constitution can-
not contain a clause (as in the United States)
allowing a ground for revolt and making
revolt a kind of ‘right’ that can be claimed.
The reason for this is that such a clause would
limit the authority of the state itself, which
would undercut the supreme authority of the
state and allow an alternative authority to
be held against it. This discussion includes a
vivid account of Kant’s opposition to the rev-
olutionary trials of Charles I and Louis XVI
and is part of a general argument for reform
rather than revolution in relation to defective
political set-ups. Despite this argument, Kant
also rules out any legitimist revolt against a
successful revolution as well.
After discussing the problems with claims
of a right to revolution, Kant turns to the ques-
tion of whether the sovereign is the supreme
77
Key Works
proprietor of the land of the state, answering
this question in the affirmative. However, the
sovereign has to thereby renounce any claim to
land as private property and Kant is opposed
to hereditary status rights with regard to land
as in the claims of a landed aristocracy. In dis-
cussing taxes, Kant makes an argument for
an indirect right of the sovereign to support
organizations providing for the poor. This is
very far from anything like a welfare claim for
the poor and hence a long way from the type
of provision discussed by Rawls.20
The rights of the sovereign are also
assessed as including distribution of offices
or salaried positions, dignities or estates and
the right of punishment. The first two have
attracted little attention but there is quite a
literature on punishment. The central ques-
tion concerns whether Kant’s view of pun-
ishment is strictly retributivist. Punishment
is described as a categorical imperative and
a principle of public equality is referred to
as governing its operation. This principle of
public equality visits on the punished the evil
he wished to inflict on others but it is only
explained in a general figurative way. For
the quantity and quality of punishment to be
determined, Kant refers to the law of retri-
bution. In the course of his discussion Kant
makes a number of intriguing points com-
paring, for example, the status of a prisoner
to that of a slave since he now has to endure
forced labour for no more than his subsist-
ence. Kant also advocates capital punish-
ment for murder though with allowance for
deportation if reasons of state suggest this. In
defending capital punishment, Kant replies
to the arguments of Beccaria using the claim
that the noumenal self of the punished person
would himself subject the phenomenal self to
the punishment in question. Kant concludes
the account of punishment with a discussion
of the sovereign’s right to grant clemency.
KEY WORKS
International Right
The second part of public right concerns the
right of nations which concerns the rights of
states in regard to each other. These rights
consist partly in rights to go to war, partly
in rights during war and partly in rights after
war. Kant argues that the external relation of
states to each other is a state of nature and
always, at least potentially, a state of war.
In this discussion, Kant also investigates the
basis of the right states claim to use their citi-
zens as soldiers in war and suggests the only
ground for such use is the view of the citizens
as having granted that right to the state.
The right to go to war includes the need
for a balance of power to attempt to prevent
any given state becoming too strong. Right
during a war is discussed and certain kinds of
methods (including extermination and sub-
jugation) ruled out in principle. Right after a
war governs the types of peace treaties that
are acceptable. However, Kant also includes
discussion of the notion of an ‘unjust enemy’,
which is defined as one whose maxims are
such as would make peace impossible. The
fact that rights of nations are so exclusively
concerned with war leads Kant to conclude
the discussion with the need to overcome the
state of nature between states, arguing for
the formation of a permanent congress of
states. The final part of public right concerns
cosmopolitan right, which governs commer-
cial relations between peoples. This discus-
sion is very brief but typically anti-colonialist
in flavour. The conclusion of the Doctrine of
Right is made with a stirring invocation of
the need to prevent war and a clear statement
that establishing universal peace is the ‘entire
final end’ (MM 355) of the work.
The second edition included an appendix
on certain areas in response to critics of the
first edition. Here Kant justifies the inclusion
78
of the notion of the right to a person that is
akin to a right to a thing and, in the process,
describes the need to move away from reified
sexual relations. Kant also adds to his discus-
sion of punishment including in the account
questions about rape and pederasty though
the discussion of these is somewhat incon-
clusive. Right from prolonged possession is
also given a further treatment, as is inherit-
ance, and the establishment of foundations
that are meant to be perpetual. The latter
includes accounts of charities with a claim
that the state must be able to relate to their
foundation as changing over time.
The Architectonic of the
Doctrine of Virtue
The Doctrine of Virtue has a much more
elaborate division than the Doctrine of Right
and its introduction is also itself an extended
piece of philosophy. As well as containing
such an extensive introduction, the work is
then divided between a doctrine of elements
and a doctrine of method with the former,
as is usual, taking up the lion’s share of the
work. The ‘Preface’ to the work justifies its
existence by making the maxims of virtue
follow from the metaphysical principles of
morals generally. Kant here rejects attempts
to base virtue on happiness.
The ‘Introduction’ describes the account of
virtue as equivalent to ethics and distinct from
right as it is concerned with internal laws.
Virtue is shown to be concerned with ends
that duties have. These ends are one’s own per-
fection and the happiness of others. Included
under the former are the cultivation of one’s
talents and one’s will. The account of the hap-
piness of others does not simply take others’
view of what would make them happy but
does include provision for the means that will
make them unlikely to be tempted by vice.

Ethics does not give laws for actions as right
does, but only for the maxims of actions. Ethical
duties are also stated to be of wide obligation
while those of right are narrow. After making
these claims, Kant returns to expounding the
ends that are duties further. The discussion of
perfection is now divided between an account
of ‘natural’ perfection and the cultivation of
morality. Kant’s most general description of
virtue is as ‘the strength of a human being’s
maxims in fulfilling his duty’ (MM 394) and
the supreme (or universal) principle of virtue
consists in acting in accord with a maxim of
ends that it can be a universal law for every-
one to have. The division of duties of virtue is
presented through two different means, firstly
through the distinction of formal and material
elements, and secondly through ‘internal’ and
‘external’ duties. The material parts of virtue
concern the ends of myself and others (per-
fection and happiness) while the formal parts
concern the law. Duties I have to myself are
‘internal’ while those to others are ‘external’.
Kant also discusses subjective conditions
for virtue, including under the heading moral
feeling, conscience and respect for oneself.
Under the heading of moral feeling, Kant
makes clear the distinction between patho-
logical and moral feeling while conscience is
presented as the way practical reason holds
the law before one. Benevolence as a form of
practical love leads to the duty to act in ways
that are beneficent to others while respect
arises within each of us due to the connec-
tion between personality and the moral law.
Virtue is based on a form of self-governing
and is said to presuppose ‘apathy’ meaning
by this a tranquil mind that has firm resolve.
Duties to Oneself
The doctrine of the elements of ­ethics
is divided into two parts, with the first
79
Key Works
concerning duties to oneself and the second
duties towards others. In introducing the
notion of duties to oneself, Kant justifies the
notion by means of setting up an antinomy
and then resolving it. The problem concerns
how it is possible to set up a law for oneself
and this is resolved by means of the distinc-
tion between the self as phenomenon and the
self as noumenon.
The division of duties to oneself has two
ways of being described. The first and most
objective is in terms of the division between
formal and material. The formal duties are
negative ones while the material ones are
positive. Another way of putting that is that
the formal duties concern how to main-
tain one’s moral health while the material
ones concern how to become more morally
healthy. But there is also a second way of
dividing these duties between duties to one-
self as a moral being and duties to oneself
as an animal being. Duties to oneself as an
animal being were first mentioned in R and
include self-preservation, the preservation of
the species and preservation of capacity to
enjoy life. Duties to oneself as a moral being
concern only the formal consistency of the
maxims of the will with one’s humanity.
Kant begins with perfect duties to oneself
and discusses firstly which duties to oneself as
an animal being fall under this heading. Here
the example of suicide that was used in G is
returned to and the problem with suicide is
traced to its manner of using one’s own being
as a discretionary end. However, Kant then
lists a series of casuistical questions, which are
repeated hereafter with regard to all the duties
discussed and which suggest cases in which
the consideration of suicide is less simple.
After the discussion of suicide, Kant con-
siders use of one’s sexual capacity with regard
to the formulations of humanity. Here Kant
considers ‘unnatural’ use of sexual capacity,
KEY WORKS
meaning by this masturbation which is sug-
gested to involve a kind of surrender of one’s
personality by giving oneself over to an ani-
mal use of oneself. The argument for this
view is less than convincing though surpris-
ingly few have responded to it.21 The last
part of the discussion concerns gluttony and
drunkenness and leads Kant to discuss din-
ner parties and their delights.
The account of the perfect duties to one-
self as a moral being is stated to be directly
opposed to the vices of lying, avarice and
false humility. Lying is placed first as it per-
verts the medium of communication but
the discussion also foreshadows Sartre’s
account of bad faith in including an account
of lying to oneself. Avarice is discussed as
undue restriction of one’s means of enjoy-
ment and helps to balance the account of
masturbation in the discussion of perfect
duties to oneself as an animal being. Servility
is argued to be problematic in lowering the
value of humanity in oneself. Duties to one-
self are further discussed in relation to one’s
own ‘innate judge’ or conscience, which is
here presented as the subjective principle
of being accountable to God for all one’s
deeds. The imperfect duties to oneself are
described more quickly and involve the
development and increase of both natural
and moral perfection.
Duties to Others
Duties of virtue to others are treated mainly
as duties to them merely as human beings.
Again there are duties that are meritori-
ous and those that are simply owed as such.
Feelings of love and respect are here men-
tioned but not as pathological feelings. The
discussion of the relationship between love
and respect is compared to the action of laws
80
of attraction and repulsion in physics with
love drawing us together as respect keeps
us apart. In carrying out duties of love I put
another under obligation to me while duties
of respect create no obligations but only ful-
fil them. The general practical notion of love
is beneficence and follows what Kant terms
the ‘law of perfection’ that is expressed in the
Gospel as loving your neighbour as yourself
(MM 450). Duties of love are explained as
duties of beneficence, gratitude and sym-
pathy. The duty of beneficence is what is
expressed in taking others’ happiness as your
own end and was one of the examples in G.
Gratitude is distinguished as a moral notion
from prudential action while sympathetic
feeling concludes the account of duties of
love. Vices that are contrary to these duties
are subsequently discussed which are envy,
ingratitude and malice.
Duties of respect are treated after duties
of love and mutual respect is a basic demand
that arises from the conception of human-
ity in general. Having contempt for others is
hence a basic violation of the respect all have
as their due. Respect for the law is identical
with consciousness of one’s duty and failure
to fulfil duties of respect is to fall directly into
vice. The vices that are contrary to the duty
of respect are arrogance, defamation and
ridicule. Arrogance is a kind of ambition that
requires others to think less of themselves
in relation to us and involves contempt for
others. Defamation is the vice of spreading
abroad matters that undermine others’ hon-
our and ridicule is a form of malice.
The general doctrine of elements concludes
with an account of friendship as a union of
love with respect. Rules of such intimacy
involve the need to keep certain limits of
it, not least by means of retaining some ele-
ments of distance from the other. However,

the problems of friendship are also clear since
Kant discusses the need to explain faults to a
friend as part of the duties of friendship. The
love that is in friendship cannot, in an ideal
case, be pathological but must rather be prac-
tical. So Kant concludes his account with a
discussion of moral friendship as an ideal and
distinguishes it from pragmatic friendship.
The doctrine of the methods of eth-
ics concludes the doctrine of virtue and is
divided into two parts, a part concerned with
teaching ethics and a part concerned with
ethical ascetics. The discussion of teaching
ethics describes a moral catechism as the
most essential element for beginning training
and provides a fragment of such a catechism.
Ethical ascetics, by contrast, cultivates the
disposition of dealing with misfortune and
doing without superfluous pleasures. It is
meant to be part of a regime of moral health
and is distinguished from ‘monkish’ ascetics.
Kant concludes the work by ruling out con-
sideration of duties to God as lying beyond
the limits of pure moral philosophy.
Notes
1
Important here also is the work of Wolfgang
Carl. See a précis in W. Carl, ‘Kant’s first drafts
of the Deduction of the Categories’, and also
L. W. Beck’s response ‘Two ways of reading
Kant’s letter to Herz. Comments on Carl’,
both in E. Förster (ed.), Kant’s Transcendental
Deductions. The Three ‘Critiques’ and the
‘Opus postumum’ (Stanford, 1989), pp. 3–20
and 21–26 respectively.
2
H. Paton, Metaphysics of Experience (London,
1936), vol. 1.
3
P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge
(Cambridge, 1987), ch. 16.
4
P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London,
1966).
5
P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge
(Cambridge, 1987) and G. Banham, Kant’s
81
Key Works
Transcendental Imagination (Basingstoke/New
York, 2006).
6
K. Ameriks, Kant’s Theory of Mind (Oxford,
2
2000 [1982]).
7
P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge
(Cambridge, 1987) discusses the latter but not
the former and R. Langton, Kantian Humility
(Oxford, 1998) the former but not the latter.
8
See e.g., G. Bird, The Revolutionary Kant
(Chicago/La Salle, IL, 2006).
9
This is, at any rate, in accord with I. Geiger, ‘Is
the assumption of a systematic whole of empiri-
cal concepts a necessary condition of knowledge’,
in Kant-Studien 94 (2003): 273–298, and P.
Abela, Kant’s Empirical Realism (Oxford, 2002),
but it is disputed in G. Bird, The Revolutionary
Kant (Chicago/La Salle, IL, 2006).
10
See L. W. Beck, ‘Does the Sage of Königsberg
have no dreams?’, in L. W. Beck, Essays on
Hume and Kant (New Haven, 1978), pp.
38–60 ; H. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental
Idealism. An Interpretation and Defense (New
Haven, 1983).
11
H. Paton, The Categorical Imperative
(Philadelphia, 1947).
12
See G. Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the
Philosophy of Science (Oxford, 1969) and
M. Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences
(Cambridge, MA, 1992).
13
See J.-F. Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of
the Sublime (Stanford, 1994).
14
See H. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political
Philosophy (Chicago, 1982).
15
G. Banham, Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics
(New York, 2000); P. Guyer, Kant’s System
of Nature and Freedom (Cambridge, 2005);
R. Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology
(Cambridge, 2007); A. Nuzzo, Kant and the
Unity of Reason (West Lafayette, 2005).
16
See respectively M. Gregor, Laws of Freedom
(Oxford, 1963); M. Timmons (ed.), Kant’s
Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays
(Oxford, 2002); and G. Banham, Kant’s Practical
Philosophy (Basingstoke/New York, 2003).
17
See respectively O. Höffe, Kant’s Cosmopolitan
Theory of Law and Peace (Cambridge, 2006)
and S. Byrd, J. Hruschka, Kant’s Doctrine of
Right: A Commentary (Cambridge, 2010).
18
The reader is referred to A. Ripstein, Force
and Freedom (Cambridge, MA, 2009);
Byrd, Hruschka, Kant’s Doctine of Right: A
KEY WORKS

Commentary; K. Flikschuh, Kant and Modern 19

Political Philosophy (Cambridge, 2000);
K. Westphal, ‘A Kantian justification of
possession’, in M. Timmons (ed.), Kant’s
Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays,
pp. 89–109; and G. Banham, Kant’s Practical
Philosophy.
O. O’Neill, ‘Children’s right and children’s
lives’, in Constructions of Reason (Cambridge,
1988), pp. 187–205.
20
J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA,
1971).
21
But see Banham, Kant’s Practical Philosophy.

82
 PART II:
KANT’S CONTEXTS
 2
PHILOSOPHICAL AND
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
This chapter includes a selection of short
essays concerned with some of the impor-
tant ideas, theories and events which helped
shape Kant’s life and thought. The essays
are diverse in content and include histori-
cal events that Kant encountered (such as
the French Revolution), as well as some of
the important individuals who stood out as
prominent figures in his cultural and philo-
sophical milieu. The chapter conveys the
extent to which Kant’s world – being almost
entirely confined to the place of his birth,
Königsberg – was illuminated by a wide and
varied amount of interests that ventured
beyond the philosophical sphere in which
he made his fame. With some of the entries
a list of further reading is provided that
will enable the reader to undertake further
research. – NH/DS
Academy prize essay
The Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences1 was
established in 1744. The prize for the win-
ning entry was 50 ducats. One of the main
attractions of these contests was the fact
that many of the judges of the contests were
85
Academy members. As well as Kant, some of
the other leading figures who put forward
essays included Lessing, → Mendelssohn,
and → Herder. On average, there were
about 12 entries per question, although
some questions attracted a wider number of
entries. For instance, the question from 1780
attracted 42 entries. Due to the difficulty of
some of the questions, it was necessary for
the Academy to repeat the same question
until essays of a sufficiently high standard
were received.
The Academy Prize attracted the atten-
tion of Kant enough for him to construct
answers to numerous questions. These were
subsequently published as EAR (1754),
Opt (1759), Inq (1764) and PE, which was
published only posthumously in 1804. The
Academy question of 1763 was:
whether the metaphysical truths in
general, and the first principles of
Theologiae naturalis and morality in
particular, admit of distinct proofs to the
same degree as geometrical truths; and if
they are not capable of such proofs, [. . .]
what the genuine nature of their certainty
is, to what degree the said certainty can
be brought, and whether this degree is
sufficient for complete conviction.2
Philosophical and Historical Context
Kant only entered the 1763 essay competi-
tion, which was set by the Royal Academy in
the previous year. Kant’s essay did not win
the contest, but it did get recognized by the
Academy. Kant received a certificate of merit
for his endeavours, as well as getting his work
published alongside Moses Mendelssohn’s
essay, which won the prize. Kant’s essay,
published as Inq, was designed to oppose the
fundamental tenets of Christian → Wolff’s
rationalist system, by claiming that the meth-
ods of mathematics and philosophy were
wholly different, a theme that continued to
resonate in Kant’s later ‘Critical’ or ‘transcen-
dental’ stage of his career. – NH
Aristotelianism
Representatives of Aristotelianism claim to
be, or just de facto are, in agreement with →
Aristotle at least insofar as some of his core
doctrines in major areas of philosophy includ-
ing his overall method are concerned, or at
any rate what they take those to be, which
are, more often than not, highly contentious.
Aristotelianism spans more than two mille-
nia, from his immediate successors as lead-
ers of the Lyceum, the school he founded in
Athens, up to the present, for example in the
movement of virtue ethics. Commentaries
on works of the Corpus Aristotelicum
emerged swiftly following its compilation
in the first century BC, with Alexander of
Aphrodisias, Porphyry, John Philoponus and
Simplicius being perhaps the most important
authors, often giving a Neoplatonist tinge to
Aristotle’s positions.
Aristotelian doctrines came into contact
with Christian thought in Patristic philoso-
phy, not least through Boethius who trans-
lated into Latin and commented on (some of)
86
Aristotle’s logical treatises of the Organon.3
Despite the closure of the Athenian schools of
philosophy in 529, and with a longer period
of continuity in the Eastern Roman Empire,
Aristotelianism, especially in the wake of
the Carolingian Renaissance, nevertheless
remained an important force on the Western
European continent.
It did so at first only on the rather slim
textual basis of the so-called logica vetus,
consisting mainly of the Categories, de
Interpretatione, and Porphyry’s Isagoge, an
introductory work to the former two. By vir-
tue of translations from Arabic and Greek and
the dissemination of Averroes’s commentaries
from the twelfth century onwards, the whole
of the Corpus Aristotelicum entered the stage
of debates in scholastic philosophy, most
notably in Paris where conflicts between, on
the one hand, the integral or neoplatonizing
heterodox school of Aristotelianism and, on
the other, orthodox Aristotelianism developed
quickly.4
These conflicts centred around doctrines
taken to be at odds with Christian teach-
ings, such as the infinite temporal extension
of the world, the uniqueness of the active
as well as passive intellect and human free-
dom in relation to divine foreknowledge.
Different movements and various interpreta-
tions of Aristotle spread, such as Averroism,
Thomism and Scotism, all of which none-
theless integrated Aristotelian doctrines into
larger frameworks together with a number of
other theological and philosophical sources
such as Augustine.
During the Renaissance, Aristotelianism
benefited from the dissemination of new
editions of Aristotle’s original texts and
those of the Greek commentators. The pro-
pulsive centre of Aristotle’s philosophy was
Italy, especially the schools of Padua and
Bologna. Between 1450 and 1550, Thomism,
 Philosophical and Historical Context
Averroism and Alexandrism became the three
major Aristotelian movements.
Meanwhile, the religious reform-
ers, in particular Luther with regard
to ethics,5 expressed strong hostility to
Aristotelianism. More moderate thinkers
such as Melanchthon, however, made sure
that Aristotle also took centre stage in the
early modern Protestant universities after
what they considered to be a purification
of his writings and doctrines from distor-
tions by some of the medieval Scholastics.
At the same time, and in a similar way to
the situation in the High and Late Middle
Ages, individual Aristotelian doctrines were
upheld within all schools of early modern
Scholasticism, for example in Suárez’s con-
ception of metaphysics, insofar as he took
it to be concerned with ens in quantum ens
(being as being).6
In general, both inside and outside the
European universities until the seventeenth
century, Aristotelianism,7 including also
political Aristotelianism, particularly in
Germany, remained a major factor and thus
constituted a crucial context for → Leibniz,
who attempted to reconcile Aristotelian doc-
trines, such as that of individual forms as
substances, with principles of mechanistic
physics. → Königsberg University is a case in
point: here Aristotelianism was present well
into the eighteenth century.
Since its foundation in 1544, Königsberg
University, the Albertina, was character-
ized by a strong Aristotelian tradition.
Melanchthon’s interpretation of Aristotle
dominated until the beginning of the seven-
teenth century, when the works of Jacopo
Zabarella and Giulio Pace became available.
During that century, Königsberg became a
stronghold of Aristotelianism, establishing
itself as one of the most important schools
in Germany with authors such as Abraham
87
Calov, Christian Dreier, Melchior Zeidler
and Andreas Hedio.
The strength of Aristotelianism was tan-
gible in particular in the field of logic: Calov
wrote a Methodologia, which is a treatise
against the philosophy of Francis → Bacon
and René → Descartes, whereas Zeidler pub-
lished a commentary on Aristotle’s Analytics
following Zabarella, and Hedio wrote a com-
mentary on Aristotle’s entire Organon.
The last important exponent of
Königsberg’s Aristotelianism was Paul
Rabe.8 His works were particularly impor-
tant because they were adopted as official
manuals of the Collegium Fridericianum and
of the Albertina, i.e. at both of the institu-
tions at which Kant himself was educated.9
All the professors at the Albertina in
the first four decades of the eighteenth
century were Aristotelians or well-read in
Aristotelian philosophy. For example, two
of the four professors who were very close
to Kant, Johann David Kypke and Georg
Gottfried Teske, defined themselves as
Aristotelians, while the other two profes-
sors, Karl Gottlieb Marquardt and Martin
Knutzen, were very erudite in Aristotelian
doctrines. During the period when Kant was
a student, Wolffianism (→ Wolff) was never
a dominant movement at the Albertina.
In fact, no professor could declare himself
truly a Wolffian and no Wolffian became
full professor in the chair of logic and
metaphysics.10
The nineteenth century saw the emer-
gence of the Berlin Academy edition of the
Corpus Aristotelicum, which put the schol-
arship and the philosophical engagement of
Aristotelianism on an unprecedented philo-
logically sound footing, which has continued
to influence various schools of philosophy
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. – WE/MS
Philosophical and Historical Context
Eberhard, Johann August
The publication of Kant’s CPR in 1781 trig-
gered an immediate response within the phil-
osophical world in Germany. The interest in
Kant’s philosophy was followed by several
debates regarding its adequacy and its claim
to novelty. Most of Kant’s opponents were
representatives of the Popularphilosophie.
Of all the attacks made on Kant’s philosophy,
that by J. A. Eberhard (1739–1809), a lead-
ing Wolffian who held → Wolff’s chair at the
University of Halle, was the most dangerous.
Eberhard was born in Halberstadt, and
studied theology at the University of Halle
(1756–1759), where he also studied some
philosophy and classical philology. In 1763,
he began pursuing a career as a preacher and
theologian, first in Halberstadt and subse-
quently in Berlin. His book Neue Apologie des
Sokrates, oder Untersuchungen der Lehre von
der Seligkeit der Heiden was first published
in 1772. The book  – which was published
in several editions and translations  – was
widely discussed at the time. The position
he developed in this book involved him in
a debate with Lessing, who among other
things accused him of having misinterpreted
→ Leibniz. Interestingly, Eberhard himself
later made the same accusation against Kant.
In 1776, Eberhard published his Allgemeine
Theorie des Denkens und Empfindens, which
was awarded the Berlin Academy prize
(→Academy prize essay). In 1778, he became
Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Halle. He published several books on various
aspects of philosophy, which also included
Vernunftlehre der natürlichen Theologie
(1787), which Kant himself used in his lec-
tures on the philosophy of religion.
In 1788, together with several other Wolf­
fians, Eberhard founded the Philosophisches
Magazin, the main goal of which was to
88
challenge Kant’s Critical philosophy. The pub-
lication of the first issue of the Philosophisches
Magazin  – which included several papers
that attacked Kant’s philosophy  – marked
the beginning of a long debate between Kant,
Eberhard and their allies. The Kantians’ first
response was Rehberg’s and Reinhold’s reviews
of the first issues of Philosophisches Magazin
(1789), which appeared in the Allgemeine
Literatur-Zeitung. Eberhard responded to
Reinhold’s review in 1790. In that same year,
Kant published his polemical essay Disc.
The Philosophisches Magazin was suc-
ceeded by the Philosophisches Archiv, which
appeared in two volumes in 1793 and 1794.
The controversy culminated in a contest of
the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin
(→ Academy prize essay) on the question,
‘What real progress has metaphysics made
in Germany since the time of Leibniz and
Wolff?’. The first prize was awarded to
Schwab, a Wolffian, and the second prize
went to Karl Leonard Reinhold. Kant’s prize
essay (PE), which was not submitted and was
published only in 1804, was his last active
contribution to this debate.
Kant’s controversy with Eberhard and his
allies addressed many issues. Eberhard’s main
contention was that Kant’s claim to novelty
in metaphysics and epistemology and, in
particular, his claim to novelty regarding
the category of synthetic a priori judgments
was unfounded. The contention that there
was nothing really new in Kant’s theory was
apparently mistaken, yet the arguments pre-
sented in the Philosophisches Magazin show
that they were supported by an ambiguity
inherent in Kant’s definitions concerning the
role of intuition in synthetic judgments, and
in particular, in synthetic a priori judgments.
The relation of the concepts involved
in synthetic a priori judgments to sensible
intuitions conceived of as a ‘condition of
 Philosophical and Historical Context
possibility’ for such judgments was required
in order to accomplish the two tasks of CPR
in one unified theory, namely, to ascertain
the a priori foundations of empirical knowl-
edge, and to challenge the dogmatic preten-
sions to knowledge that is based merely on
pure reason. According to Kant’s definitions,
a synthetic a priori judgment is a judgment
in which the predicate is not ‘contained’ or
‘thought’ in the subject term and also a judg-
ment that involves a relation to intuition.
Nevertheless, according to Kant’s own
theory, it seems that judgments could also
be characterized as synthetic a priori with-
out involving a relation to intuition, at least
insofar as the relation ‘not being contained
or thought in’ is concerned. Moreover, it
appears that this must be the case, if the pre-
tentions of knowledge that are based merely
on pure reason consist in synthetic a priori
judgments. On the one hand, the critique of
dogmatic metaphysics is based on the con-
tention that the condition of possibility of
synthetic a priori judgments is the relation
between the concepts involved in such judg-
ments and sensible intuitions. On the other
hand, where this kind of synthetic a priori
judgment is concerned, it is not possible to
establish a relation between the a priori con-
cepts involved in them and the relevant kind
of intuition. In other words, Kant holds the
view that the judgments that express the pre-
tentions to knowledge merely based on pure
reason are synthetic a priori, although the
concepts involved in them are not and can-
not be related to intuitions. Yet, the generic
demand for such a relation regarding all
synthetic a priori judgments is essential for
the feasibility of his critique of dogmatic
metaphysics.
These types of concern seem to underlie
Eberhard and his allies’ response to Kant’s
philosophy. Moreover, in their view, if one
89
unties the relation between synthetic a priori
judgment and sensible intuitions, it can be
shown that the type of judgment character-
ized by Kant as synthetic a priori was in fact
known to philosophers and logicians long
before Kant. Synthetic a priori judgments
are judgments in which the predicate is an
attribute of the subject of judgment. The
predicate of such a judgment is a concept
that refers to a property that is necessarily
related to the property to which the subject
term refers, although it is not a characteris-
tic of the essence of the subject. By contrast,
judgments in which the predicates are char-
acteristics that are part of the essence of the
subject are equivalent to Kant’s analytic
judgments. The meaning of Eberhard’s sug-
gestion can, for example, be understood with
the help of the theory presented in Arnauld
and Nicole’s Logic or the Art of Thinking,11
one of the most influential logic textbooks of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
This and related charges were not fatal to
the reception of Kant’s ontology and theory
of knowledge. Nevertheless, they exposed the
apparent ambiguity inherent in Kant’s offi-
cial formulations regarding the role of intui-
tions in syntheticity, as well as the difficulties
related to the possibility of accomplishing the
two goals of Kant’s Critical philosophy men-
tioned above in one theory. As a result, phi-
losophers who were exposed to this debate
and were inspired by the Kantian revolution
in metaphysics attempted to reassess the role
of intuition in the vindication of reason with-
out abandoning what they conceived to be
the main tenets of the Kantian legacy. – YS
Further Reading
H. Allison, The Kant-Eberhard Controversy
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1973).
Philosophical and Historical Context
M. Y. Senderowicz, ‘Facing the bounds of
tradition: Kant’s controversy with the
Philosophisches Magazin’, Science in
Context 11,2 (1998): 205–228.
E. Watkins (ed.), Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason. Background Source Materials
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), ch. 8.
Empiricism
The most common variety of empiricism is
concept empiricism. This is the view that
all of our concepts are derived from expe-
rience. This view is perhaps most famously
expressed by John → Locke who argues that
we do not have any innate ideas. Initially,
according to Locke, the mind is like ‘white
Paper void of all Characters, without any
ideas’. It is experience alone that is the source
‘from whence all the ideas we have, or can
naturally have, do spring’.12 David → Hume
is another modern philosopher who is also
a concept empiricist. Hume argues for the
conclusion that ‘all our ideas or more feeble
perceptions are copies of our impressions or
more lively ones’.13
When writing about empiricism from the
modern period, Kant regularly cites Locke14
but he typically classifies Hume as a sceptic
(e.g. A764=B792 and P 262) rather than an
empiricist. Of the ancient philosophers, Kant
often cites → Epicurus as an empiricist,15
but Kant writes that among all philosophers
‘Aristotle can be regarded as the head of
the empiricists’ (A854=B882). This seems
to be due to the fact that Kant attributes to
→ Aristotle the belief that ‘nothing is in the
intellect which was not first in the senses’.16
One of Kant’s objections to concept
empiricism is that he believes most concept
90
empiricists are inconsistent. Kant’s point
is not that it is impossible to be a consist-
ent concept empiricist, just that most are
not. He especially levels this charge against
Locke. Kant has in mind the fact that after
arguing that all concepts (including the
concept of God) are derived from experi-
ence, Locke goes on, in book 4, chapter 10,
of the Essay to argue that we are able to
have demonstrative knowledge of the exist-
ence of God.17 On the other hand, Kant
expressly mentions that Epicurus is consist-
ent in his empiricism, ‘for in his inferences
he never exceeded the bounds of experience’
(A854=B882).
Of course, the more important prob-
lem that Kant has with concept empiricism
is that he believes it is false. One of Kant’s
fundamental assertions is that some of our
concepts, such as the pure concepts of under-
standing, are not derived from the senses, but
instead have their source in the understand-
ing itself.
A second, stronger, variety of empiricism
is the view that there is no a priori cognition
of any kind – that is, there is no cognition
that does not logically depend on experi-
ence. It is interesting to note that in a stu-
dent’s lecture notes from the mid-1770s, it is
reported that Kant attributed this stronger
variety of empiricism to Aristotle himself
(LM 542).
A philosopher, however, might be a con-
cept empiricist and yet hold that some of
our knowledge is grounded in reason and
not experience, and hence is a priori. This is
the case, for example, with both Locke and
Hume. Hume, for example, accepts that there
are Relations of Ideas – propositions dealing
with ‘the sciences of Geometry, Algebra, and
Arithmetic; and in short, every affirmation,
which is either intuitively or demonstratively
certain’ (EHU, 4.1). According to Hume,
 Philosophical and Historical Context
‘[p]ropositions of this kind are discoverable
by the mere operation of thought, without
dependence on what is any where existent in
the universe’ (EHU, 4.1).
For Locke, this sort of knowledge arises
when we can use intuition or demonstra-
tion (both of which are traditionally thought
to have their roots in Aristotle’s Posterior
Analytics) to immediately or mediately
perceive the agreement between two ideas
(ECHU, 4.2). As mentioned above, Locke
believes that our demonstrative knowledge
extends beyond just the mathematical sci-
ences – it can extend to our moral knowledge
as well as to our knowledge of the existence
of God (ECHU, 4.4.7ff. and 4.10).
Kant, of course, rejects this stronger ver-
sion of empiricism as well. He holds that
‘although all our cognition commences with
experience, yet it does not on that account
all arise from experience’ (B1). Kant,
however, disagrees with the Lockean and
Humean position that this a priori cogni-
tion is limited to what he would call ana-
lytic judgments, whose ‘truth must always
be able to be cognized sufficiently in accord-
ance with the principle of contradiction’
(A151=B190). Instead Kant believes there
are also synthetic judgments that can be
cognized a priori. In the case of theoreti-
cal synthetic a priori judgments, these are
grounded, not in experience itself, but in
what is required for the possibility of expe-
rience. On the other hand, our a priori prac-
tical cognition is rooted in freedom and the
fact of reason. – SB
Further Reading
W. Waxman, ‘Kant’s debt to the British
Empiricists’, in G. Bird (ed.), A Companion
to Kant (Malden, MA/Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010), pp. 93–107.
91
Frederick the Great
‘If this ruler is not worthy of being a King, I
do not know who is’, D’Alembert wrote of
Frederick the Great.18 Praise came both from
contemporary writers, including Boswell and
Voltaire, as well as historians who sought
to emphasize his role as a participant in
and promoter of the ideas of the European
Enlightenment. During his reign, from 1740
to 1786, Frederick the Great oversaw →
Prussia’s rise to a great power, yet it is his
intellectual range that most impressed visi-
tors at his court at Sans-Souci. As his copi-
ous writings testify, he took an active role in
philosophical debates of the time, including
those that touched on politics and religion.
On the latter topic, he recommends tolerance
and argues that the monarch has no right
to dictate the citizen’s beliefs. Yet, as Lewis
White Beck observes,19 there is little evidence
that religious and political dissent was rife in
Germany, compared to France and England.
To that extent, Frederick’s maxim, quoted
with approval by Kant in E, ‘Argue as much
as you will and about whatever you will, but
obey!’ (E 37) seems aptly descriptive.
Frederick saw himself as embodying the
ideal of ‘enlightened absolutism’. The core
idea is that absolute rule resembles a wise
oligarchy with the king at its head executing
policies that aim to promote the common
interest and forge a bond of loyalty among
the citizens. Frederick even envisaged a role
for a philosopher to act as a secret coun-
sellor, advising and instructing on policy,
but leaving the practical matter of the exer-
cise of power to the king. Thus, the king
enhances his role by uniting in his person
wisdom as well as power while making few
concessions to the socially and politically
emancipatory aspirations of Enlightenment
thinkers.
Philosophical and Historical Context
The dialectic of freedom and restraint
encapsulated in the motto ‘argue but obey’
shapes the German debate about the mean-
ing and limits of ‘enlightenment’, to which
Kant is a prominent contributor. The begin-
ning of this ‘reflective phase’ of the German
Enlightenment can be dated to the 1778
essay competition organized by the Royal
Academy in Berlin (→ Academy prize essay)
on a topic suggested by Frederick: ‘whether
it is to the advantage of the common mass
of humanity to be deceived, insofar as they
are led into new errors or kept within their
customary ones’.20
Kant’s, → Mendelssohn’s and Reinhold’s
essays on the topic appeared towards the
end of Frederick’s rule, when Enlightenment
was on the wane as an intellectual move-
ment. By addressing the potential conflict
between intellectual and political authority,
the German Aufklärer flesh out the tensions
of the uneasy union of knowledge and power
of enlightened absolutism itself. Johann
Georg Hamann (1730–1788), a fierce critic
of Kant’s account of enlightenment, argues
that immaturity is a correlate of the absolute
guardianship of Frederick II. By conveniently
‘forgetting’ Frederick II, Hamann argues,
Kant offers a skewed diagnosis, which
renders the public use of reason, the remedy
to immaturity, unconvincing.21
The fundamental issue that Hamann raises
concerns the relation between authority and
power in Kant’s essay E. While it is true that
Kant praises the motto ‘argue but obey’, he
does so in a historical context where even the
limited, that is, religious, freedoms granted
by Frederick were being rescinded and his
power was declining. If we add to this that
religious intolerance, which Kant describes
as the most pernicious form of all, his
endorsement of Frederick’s motto acquires
a different complexion, expressing support
92
for a very limited freedom that was already
under threat.
Still, the question remains of how the free-
dom to make public use of one’s reason fits
in with the dictum ‘argue but obey’. There is
a conceptual ambiguity about the authority
that has a legitimate claim to our obedience.
Where Hamann’s criticisms strike home, in
other words, is in his claim that, despite his
appeal to the authority of reason, Kant still
leaves intact the authority of one guardian,
the guardian par excellence, namely Frederick
II. The authority of the king is not supported
by reason, Hamann points out, but rather by
a large and well-disciplined army. He then
concludes that it is this external power that
keeps the immature in their place, and not
their laziness or intellectual cowardice.
One may ask to what extent this power
itself can be the object of critical debate. In
principle, no subject should be out of bounds
to rational criticism, to which, as Kant says,
‘everything must submit’ (Axii n.). Yet, if the
external authority of the king is considered
independently binding, then, despite Kant’s
claim that the public use of one’s reason
should be free in ‘all matters’ (E 36), the
authority of the king would still be placed
outside the legitimate boundaries of critical
argument. Those who seek to make public
use of their reason would still have to negoti-
ate between two competing claims to author-
ity: one issuing from the king, the other from
reason.
A hint of how Kant envisages the issue
being resolved is contained in the conclu-
sion of E where he vigorously defends the
view that man is more than a machine and
should be treated in accordance with his
dignity (E  40). Only two years before the
publication of this essay, Frederick wrote: ‘I
regard man as a clockwork machine subject
to the springs which drive it [. . .] [which] is
 Philosophical and Historical Context
humiliating for our pride, but unfortunately
only too true.’22 – KD
Further Reading
J. Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment?
Eighteenth Century Answers and
Twentieth Century Questions (Berkeley/
Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1996).
French Revolution
According to contemporary reports, Kant
followed closely and discussed with great
interest political events generally and the
French Revolution and its aftermath in par-
ticular. He responded to the Revolution
with great enthusiasm and remained its
staunch supporter even when this position
was rather unpopular and might occasion
censure. In view of the great hopes he placed
in the Revolution and the subsequent politi-
cal events in France, it is striking that Kant
asserts clearly and often that revolutions are
categorically forbidden.
The argument against revolutions, repeated
in his published works, is simple. There can
be no right to revolt, because revolution is the
destruction of the state of right. A ‘constitu-
tion cannot contain any article that would
make it possible for there to be some author-
ity in a state to resist the supreme commander
in case he should violate the law of the con-
stitution’ (MM 319)  – an authority higher
than the highest authority is ‘self-contradic-
tory’ (MM 319).23 Indeed, it is a ‘law that is
so holy (inviolable) that it is already a crime
even to call it in doubt in a practical way [. . .]
that the presently existing legislative author-
ity ought to be obeyed, whatever its origin’
93
(MM 319). This principle indeed extends to
a power established by a successful revolu-
tion (MM 323). If a ruler acts against the law,
‘subjects may indeed oppose this injustice by
complaints (gravamina) but not by resistance’
(MM 319). Even in the case of ‘the oppressive
power of a so-called tyrant [. . .] it is still in
the highest degree wrong of the subjects to
seek their right in this way’ (PP 382).
It is remarkable that Kant does not hold
even the tyrannical violation of the origi-
nal contract by a ruler to be the dissolution
of the state of right, because no authority
could possibly pronounce such a judgment.24
Necessary changes in a constitution can be
‘carried out only through reform by the sov-
ereign itself, but not by the people, and there-
fore not by revolution’ (MM 322).
There is, of course, no logical contradic-
tion between holding revolutions to be cat-
egorically forbidden and believing that a
revolution might be a step forward, indeed
a necessary step, towards the moral and
political destiny of humanity. Indeed, it is the
central claim of Kant’s philosophy of history
that human progress is driven by antagonism
and violence. There is, however, a deep ten-
sion between these positions, especially when
both the necessity and the impermissibility of
such violence are seen with great clarity. This
tension is evident in Kant’s writings.
In an intriguing Reflexion, Kant suggests
that the French Revolution was not, in fact,
a revolution. The National Assembly repre-
sented the people and possessed the author-
ity to change the constitution, because Louis
XVI himself summoned the Estates-General
and invested it with indeterminate legislative
authority (Refl 8055).
In the Doctrine of Right, he offers again
this analysis of events and claims that for this
reason the ‘monarch’s sovereignty wholly dis-
appeared (it was not merely suspended) and
Philosophical and Historical Context
passed to the people’ (MM 341). But in the
same text, not many pages before, he seems
to claim that such so-called abdications are in
fact extorted from the monarch and calls such
acts crimes (MM 320–322n.). Elsewhere, Kant
speaks of revolutions that ‘nature of itself has
brought [. . .] about’ (PP 373n.), that is, situ-
ations in which ‘everything has either of itself
become ripe for a complete overthrow or has
been made almost ripe by peaceful means’
(PP 373n.). It bears emphasizing that nature
here is human nature.
A fascinating passage in the second part of
CF (CF 79–94) seems to express well Kant’s
personal position in relation to the French
Revolution. He discusses a contemporary
event that demonstrates, so he claims, the
moral disposition of humanity. This event, it
is important to emphasize, is not a political
act, but the ‘mode of thinking of the specta-
tors’ (CF 85) in view of it. Kant writes: ‘The
revolution of a gifted people which [we]
have seen unfolding in our day may succeed
or miscarry; it may be filled with misery and
atrocities to the point that a right-thinking
human being, were he boldly to hope to exe-
cute it successfully the second time, would
never resolve to make the experiment at such
cost – this revolution, I say, nonetheless finds
in the hearts of all spectators (who are not
engaged in this game themselves) a wishful
participation that borders closely on enthu-
siasm the very expression of which is fraught
with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can
have no other cause than a moral predisposi-
tion in the human race.’ (CF 85) – IG
Garve-Feder review
Also known as the ‘Göttingen Review’ as
it was published in a journal based out of
94
Göttingen, this is one of the very first reviews
of CPR, which appeared in 1781 shortly
after the publication of the first edition. It
is a composite production since, although it
was originally written by Christian Garve
(1742–1798), it was subsequently edited by
Johann Feder (1740–1821). Feder’s editing
was pretty drastic since the final published
version was two-thirds shorter than the orig-
inal and a good portion of the published ver-
sion was in the form of paragraphs inserted
by Feder.
The published version of the review pro-
vides an overview of the content of CPR but
opens with a description of the argument
of the Transcendental Aesthetic that explic-
itly compares Kant’s view of sensation with
Berkeley’s form of idealism. This compressed
form of the review moves directly from the
Transcendental Aesthetic to the Amphiboly
with only minimal discussion of most of the
argument of the Transcendental Analytic. The
focus subsequently shifts to the Dialectic but
expresses disbelief in Kant’s solution to the
problems raised there. The final paragraph
repeats the accusation that Kant’s idealism,
as based on an account of ‘representation’,
has failed to differentiate itself from what has
previously been understood as ‘idealism’.
The publication of this review angered
Kant and he replied to it in the ‘Appendix’
he wrote for P. Kant here pointed out that
the published review, in confusing his posi-
tion with that of Berkeley’s, failed to take
account of the point that Berkeley’s view is
Platonic (→ Plato) in attributing true reality
only to ideas, not to the data of the senses. By
contrast, Kant’s own view is that cognition
by means of pure reason or understanding
alone is illusory and it is only in experi-
ence that there is truth, the opposite of the
Berkeleyan view (P 374). Kant follows this
point up through reference to the argument
 Philosophical and Historical Context
in the Transcendental Aesthetic that there are
a priori conditions for sensible perception,
something Berkeley does not recognize. On
the basis of these points, Kant suggests that
his own doctrine should be termed ‘formal’
or ‘critical’ idealism (P 375), even, at one
point, retracting the term ‘transcendental
idealism’ (P 293).
Kant further accuses the reviewer of
adopting a superior tone of alleged insight,
an accusation he later repeats in disputes
with Platonists (cf. PTS) (→ Plato). The
key point that the review neglects even to
mention the problem of the synthetic a pri-
ori is supplemented by a suggestion that if
the reviewer found Kant’s solution of the
Antinomies unconvincing perhaps he might
offer one instead. Kant concludes by asking
the reviewer to shed his anonymity (P 379).
Garve, who knew Kant, was embarrassed
when he read Kant’s response and revealed to
Kant, in a letter dated 13 July 1783 (Corr-I
328–333), that he had originally composed
the review but added that it had been changed
out of recognition by the editor of the jour-
nal. The original form of Garve’s review
was subsequently published unedited. In
this much longer response, Garve is explicit
about translating Kant’s thoughts into more
popular idiom, which also involves setting
the task of the Critical philosophy in empiri-
cist terms.
Garve’s version still says little about either
the deductions or the schematism but does
(albeit very briefly) survey the Analogies and
the Postulates. As with the published review,
however, it spends much more time deal-
ing with the Dialectic and explicitly argues
that the Fourth Paralogism does no more
than abolish the Cartesian conception of
privileged access to our own consciousness
without proving the existence of bodies (→
Descartes).
95
Garve also expresses dissatisfaction with
Kant’s account of practical reason and
demotes a priori intuition to being only ‘a sen-
sible image of a concept of understanding’.25
He also essentially rejects Kant’s attempt to
recast the understanding of ‘idealism’ albeit
not quite so harshly as in the published review.
It must have been evident to Kant, on reading
Garve’s original, that the basic problems he
had with the published review did apply in
equal measure to Garve’s original, which like-
wise did not discuss the problem of the syn-
thetic a priori or present its own resolution of
the difficulties set out in the Antinomies.
The influence of this review on both Kant
himself and the general reception of the Critical
philosophy were considerable. The recast-
ing of the Paralogisms chapter in the second
edition of CPR and the provision of the new
Refutation of Idealism as part of the Postulates
are clearly responses to the review’s attack on
Kant’s idealism. The stress the review put on
the role of representation in Kant’s view also
influenced some of Kant’s advocates, however,
since Karl Reinhold makes this stress key to
his work Letters on the Kantian Philosophy.26
The suggestion made by the review that Kant’s
idealism is close to that of Berkeley has been
repeated many times since it was published.27
Kant’s decision to write P at all, not just
the appendix, may well have been due to his
conception that a popular presentation of
the doctrine of CPR was necessary to coun-
ter that contained in the review and this need
for a popular presentation also spurred on
the work of Reinhold.28 – GB
Further Reading
F. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German
Philosophy from Kant to Fichte
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1987), ch. 6.
Philosophical and Historical Context
M. Kuehn, ‘Kant’s critical philosophy and
its reception – the first five years (1781–
1786)’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Kant and Modern
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), pp. 630–663.
Herder, Johann Gottfried
A Lutheran clergyman, historian of culture,
aesthetic theorist, and philosophical anthro-
pologist, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–
1803) was born in the East Prussian town of
Mohrungen (→ Prussia) to a family with lim-
ited means. By the good offices of a medical
officer in the occupying Russian army during
the Seven Years War (1756–63), he came to
study at the University of → Königsberg from
1762 to 1764. There he came to the atten-
tion, and became the favourite student, of
Immanuel Kant. Herder’s notes from Kant’s
courses of this period represent some of the
earliest and most important sources we have
for the study of the pre-Critical Kant. Even
after Herder left the university, Kant stayed
in close contact with him, sending him the
segments of his new book, DSS (published
in 1765), as each set left the printer (→
Swedenborg). Herder wrote an enthusiastic
review of the finished book as one of his ear-
liest publications.
While a student in Königsberg, Herder
befriended and came under the influence of
Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), through
whom he learned English and was drawn
into aesthetic and literary criticism. Kant
and Hamann became the two polar forces
in Herder’s intellectual development, and
a great controversy has ensued over which
of the two proved dominant. The noted
scholar Isaiah Berlin has contended that
96
Hamann and Herder represented a ‘Counter-
Enlightenment’ utterly opposed to the ration-
alism and secularism of Kant and the wider
European → Enlightenment, with long-term
consequences for the rise of German right-
wing nationalism.29 While the latter move-
ment did invoke Herder along these lines,
the consensus of current scholarship is that
this was a misappropriation of Herder’s
thought, which belongs quite clearly in the
Enlightenment context. The best judgment is
that of the nineteenth-century scholar Rudolf
Haym, who termed Herder ‘a Kantian of
the year 1765’, that is, a disciple of the pre-
Critical Kant.30 In particular, this meant
that Herder chose to pursue anthropology,
as against philosophy, as his guiding frame-
work for understanding cultural experience.
His favourite works of Kant were Obs and,
even more, NH, but he never accepted Kant’s
‘Critical turn’. Herder’s most important
work would seek a physiological psychology
linked to aesthetic form and a cultural his-
tory which articulated the unique expressions
of the various peoples primarily of Europe.
His rubric for this was anthropology or ‘the
natural history of human consciousness’.
After a journey to France in 1769, Herder
returned to Germany and became the friend
and mentor of the young Johann Goethe
(1749–1832), and together they launched
the Sturm und Drang movement in the early
1770s. Herder published two works in 1774,
Oldest Documents of the Human Race and
Yet Another Philosophy of History, which
gave vent to a brash sense of personal gen-
ius characteristic of this Sturm und Drang
mood. All this alarmed Kant, who expressed
his displeasure first in correspondence with
Hamann, and then privately in a set of harsh
unpublished Reflexionen (Refl) over the course
of the later 1770s. When Herder published
On Knowledge and Feeling in the Human
 Philosophical and Historical Context
Soul in 1778, articulating a critique of fac-
ulty psychology along lines that appeared
directly hostile to Kant’s own philosophical
endeavours over the so-called ‘silent decade’
of the 1770s, Kant’s hostility to Herder hard-
ened still further. When his CPR appeared in
1781 to poor reception, Kant held Herder
personally responsible for changing the intel-
lectual temper of German reception toward
a reckless and self-indulgent aestheticism,
as against the dry rigour that Kant believed
essential for effective thought.
When Herder published the first volumes
of his masterwork, Ideas for a Philosophy
of the History of Mankind, in 1784, Kant
took advantage of an invitation to review
the work to make public his distaste for
Herder’s writings. The review, appearing in
the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung in 1785,
had a wide public impact and led to far more
overt hostilities between the two figures. In
subsequent volumes of his work, Herder
counterattacked, and in a second review,
Kant continued his criticism. Their conflict
widened in the context of the concurrent
‘Pantheism Controversy’, triggered by the
revival of Spinoza’s philosophy in Germany
(→ Spinoza/Spinozism). While Herder wel-
comed this in his God: Some Conversations
(1787), Kant sharply repudiated the revival.
A letter to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–
1819) in 1789 showed Kant willing to reach
out even to those he did not fully respect in
order to build alliances against Herder.
One of the defenders of Herder in the
context of Kant’s reviews of the Ideas, Karl
Reinhold (1757–1823), converted in 1786
to become Kant’s decisive popularizer in
Germany. As Kant became the most famous
and influential philosopher of the balance of
the century, he organized his disciples actively
in opposition to Herder. The latter had moved
to Weimar in the 1780s at the invitation of
97
his friend Goethe, who secured him a posi-
tion there as General Superintendent of the
Lutheran clergy. Goethe sided with Herder
in the Pantheism Controversy, just as he had
been Herder’s most eager companion and
reader as Herder composed the Ideas. But
after an interval in Italy in the late 1780s
Goethe returned to Weimar with a different
orientation, and this climaxed after 1792, in
his new and defining friendship with the poet
Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), who had
become an enthusiastic Kantian.
Herder lost his strongest alliance and
became increasingly isolated and embit-
tered. The upshot was the publication, near
the end of his life, of two book-length dia-
tribes against Kant: first, Metacritique of
the Critique of Pure Reason (1799), against
Kant’s theoretical philosophy, and then
Kalligone (1800), against Kant’s aesthetics.
The dominant Kantian culture of the end of
the eighteenth century accepted the master’s
judgment that these works demonstrated
that ‘unreason and deliberate deception are
Herder’s trademark’ (OP-I 225). However,
a just balance in the appraisal of these two
major figures of the German Enlightenment
has yet to be achieved. – JZa
Further Reading
J. Zammito, ‘ “Method” versus “manner”?
Kant’s critique of Herder’s Ideen in the
light of the epoch of science, 1790–1820’,
in H. Adler, W. Koepke (eds), Herder
Jahrbuch/Herder Yearbook 1998
(Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), pp. 1–25.
J. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth
of Anthropology (Chicago/London:
University of Chicago Press, 2002).
J. Zammito, E. Menze, K. Menges, ‘Johann
Gottfried Herder revisited: The revolution
in scholarship in the last quarter century’,
Philosophical and Historical Context
Journal of the History of Ideas 71,4
(2010): 661–684.
Hutcheson, Francis
Kant mentions Hutcheson by name but sel-
dom and only twice in his major works in
moral philosophy. In these texts and in lec-
tures on ethics in the 1780s (G 442n.; CPrR
40; LE 253; LE-M 621; see also ID 396), he
seems to dismiss Hutcheson rather curtly as
an adherent of the theory of moral sense,
classified as a misguided attempt to offer an
inner empirical grounding of morality. Yet
according to contemporary reports, Kant
held Hutcheson in high esteem from the mid-
dle of the 1750s and recommended his works
for intensive study.31 This interest clearly did
not wane in the next decade. In the announce-
ment of his winter lectures for 1765/66, Kant
says that his course on ethics will follow →
Baumgarten, but adds that the ‘attempts of
Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Hume, although
incomplete and defective, have nonetheless
penetrated furthest in the search for the fun-
damental principles of all morality’ (AL 311;
see also Inq 300).
This survey has led many to the view that
Kant’s earlier thinking was influenced by
Hutcheson and moral sense theories more
generally, but that his mature moral philos-
ophy contains hardly a trace of these early
lessons. In a seminal paper, Dieter Henrich
argues against this view and indeed calls
Hutcheson the → Hume of Kantian eth-
ics.32 According to Henrich, Kant came to
believe early on that the universality and
categorical obligation of moral laws are sure
evidence of the fact that their origin is rea-
son. Nevertheless, he remained indebted to
Hutcheson’s insight that moral conscious-
ness has an essential affective aspect.
98
Ultimately, this insight shapes the criti-
cal conception of our peculiar interest in or
feeling of respect for morality. But Kant was
also motivated by Hutcheson’s criticism of
rationalist ethics to draw his own conclusions
about the reigning, theoretically oriented
conception of reason. This influence eventu-
ally led Kant to his original conception of the
will – a notion Hutcheson employs, but can
only think of as affective – as pure practical
reason.33
Kant’s conception of the feeling of respect
for the moral law is a subject of consider-
able controversy (CPrR 71–89). According
to one interpretation, we act morally when
consciousness of the law incites a sufficiently
strong feeling of respect. But this view seems
plainly to contradict the claim that reason
alone is the objective determining ground of
moral action. Kant may well have Hutcheson
in mind when he asserts that we do not act
morally if the ‘determination of the will
takes place conformably with the moral law
but only by means of a feeling, of whatever
kind, that has to be presupposed in order for
the law to become a sufficient determining
ground of the will’ (CPrR 71). According
to other views, the feeling of respect either
necessarily accompanies moral action or is
its phenomenological effect. On both views,
Kant’s mature theory remains indebted to
the insight that moral consciousness has an
essential affective aspect.
Yet another view holds that while the
moral law is the objective determining
ground of the will, it is the feeling of respect
it evokes that is the effective force driving
action. According to this view, Kant’s mature
theory of moral motivation is indebted to
Hutcheson’s insight that ‘affections’ alone
can serve as ‘exciting reasons’.
No investigation of the role of feelings in
Kant’s theory of moral agency is complete
 Philosophical and Historical Context
without examining his later and rather
neglected discussion of it (MM 399–403).
Two points are crucial to its assessment:
First, in contrast to his earlier claim that
respect is the one moral feeling, Kant seems
here to name four more: ‘moral feeling, con-
science, love of one’s neighbor, and respect
for oneself (self-esteem)’ (MM 399). Second,
these feelings are neither mere accompani-
ments of moral action nor phenomenological
responses to it. They are necessary conditions
of moral agency: ‘every human being has
them, and it is by virtue of them that he can
be put under obligation’ (MM 399).
What precisely are these four affective
conditions of moral agency, what are the sys-
tematic connections between them and how
are they related to the feeling of respect, are
questions that demand intensive attention.
Also important to ask is what accounts for
the affective detail that colours the discus-
sion of the system of duties in the Doctrine
of Virtue. Answering these questions will
allow us to assess the lasting influence of the
idea of moral sensibility on Kant’s theory of
moral agency. – IG
Königsberg
Königsberg, today known as Kaliningrad
and part of Russia, was the capital of East →
Prussia from the Late Middle Ages until 1945
and was Kant’s birthplace. It was founded
by the Teutonic Knights around 1255 dur-
ing the Northern Crusades. Due to its cru-
cial position on the Baltic Sea, Königsberg
became one of the most vital cultural cen-
tres of Prussia during the Renaissance. Its
main cultural institution was the University
Albertina, which was founded by Duke
Albrecht I in 1554.
99
Since its foundation, Königsberg
University was characterized by a strong
Aristotelian tradition. The great success of →
Aristotelianism was probably partly due to the
intimate relationship between the first dean,
Georg Sabinus, and Philip Melanchthon:
Sabinus was Melanchthon’s son-in-law. The
early Aristotelianism in Königsberg was
therefore characterized by the Philippistic
interpretation of → Aristotle that also
enjoyed the esteem of the political authori-
ties. In the seventeenth century, Königsberg
became a stronghold of Aristotelianism
and Scholasticism with important figures
like Abraham Calov, Christian Dreier, and
Melchior Zeidler. Königsberg was one of
the first centres to introduce and comment
on Jesuit philosophy in Germany in the first
two decades of the seventeenth century, even
though Aristotelianism extended its legacy
also to the first decades of the eighteenth
century.
In Königsberg, the period from the end
of the seventeenth and the beginning of the
eighteenth century was characterized by a
number of reversals of philosophical orienta-
tion. The Albertina was a crucible of fierce
disputes among different schools.34 More in
particular, in the period from 1715 to 1740
Aristotelianism, Eclecticism and Wolffianism
(→ Wolff) competed for the supremacy in
both theology and philosophy, during which
period each of these schools alternately
prevailed.35
Indeed, the beginning of the eighteenth
century was characterized by a strong con-
servatism in both theology and philosophy.36
Aristotelianism and Protestant scholasti-
cism were the dominant schools, which
both rejected the modern philosophies and
sciences such as those of → Bacon and →
Descartes. At least until the winter semester
of 1719/20, the university courses were the
Philosophical and Historical Context
prerogative of Aristotelians such as Johann
Jakob Quandt and Johann Jakob Rohde.37
From 1717, → Pietism and Wolffianism
became increasingly important in the aca-
demic setting. In particular, Wolffianism gave
a decisive blow to the Aristotelian move-
ment since the early 1720s, becoming effec-
tively part of the academic environment as
is evidenced by the philosophical activity
of Johann Christian Friedrich Baumgarten,
Theodor Reinhard That and Johann Heinrich
Kreuschner. Some of the Königsberg pro-
fessors responded favourably to the new
Wolffian publications and some instruc-
tors were even prompted to immediately
accept ‘the new creed as a group ideology’.38
However, full professors of the philosophical
faculty like Georg Thegen and Johann David
Kypke, the latter a friend of Kant, ‘were
impervious to the new trend’.39
Nevertheless, Wolffians had a brief
moment of glory between 1717 and 1723
when they allied themselves with the Pietists
against the conservatism of the Aristotelians.
Evidence of this is the widespread and exten-
sive use of Wolffian textbooks. The alliance
between Wolffians and Pietists lasted only
for so long however; already in 1723 the
affair ‘Wolff’ erupted in Halle, stirred up by
the Pietists, especially in Königsberg.40 Acting
against the Wolffians, in 1725 King William
I appointed to the theological faculty two
Pietist professors, Abraham Wolf and Georg
Friedrich Rogall.41 In 1726, together with
Heinrich Lysius Rogall introduced a uni-
versity reform in conformity with Pietism,
against Wolffianism, which was effectively
banished until 1740, when Frederick II (→
Frederick the Great) became king.42
The Pietist movement changed the univer-
sity curricula, removed Wolffians from teach-
ing posts, and favoured Eclectic philosophers.
Instead, the textbooks of Christian Thomasius
100
and Johann Franz Budde became a great suc-
cess among academics. Aristotelianism and
Wolffianism, headed by Jakob Quandt, coun-
terattacked against Pietism, and to resolve
the acrimonious situation the king appointed
Franz Albert Schultz, who was a Pietist and
also a student of Wolff in Halle, as mediator.43
However, Wolffians never regained the
upper hand, also not when the Pietist inter-
diction against Wolffian philosophy waned
with the coronation of Frederick II: no pro-
fessor could declare himself truly a Wolffian
scholar and no Wolffian became full profes-
sor.44 It was different with the condition of
the Aristotelians, such as Kypke and Rohde,45
who were marginalized by Pietism, but were
not banished, and whose doctrines were
weakened towards Eclecticism.
The Enlightenment in Königsberg was
born against the background of these con-
flicts, which led to a general Eclecticism,
which exercised some influence on the young
Kant. At least until 1740, Pietists controlled
Königsberg University, and even if afterwards
their influence was still strong, there was an
increasing dissemination of Wolffian philos-
ophy in the courses, through the mediation
of → Leibniz’s perspective, as the works of
Konrad G. Marquardt and Martin Knutzen
show. Both Marquardt and Knutzen were
teachers of Kant during his university years.
Along with the dissemination of the
Wolffian handbooks, the works of the British
empiricists became more and more popular
in Königsberg, which thanks to its direct
contact with the British world was a hub of
Lockeanism (→ Locke), involving important
projects of translation carried out by Knutzen
himself and by Georg David Kypke.
In the same period, the philosophy of
Christian August → Crusius became very
widespread in Königsberg with authors
such as Friedrich Johann Buck and Daniel
 Philosophical and Historical Context
Weymann, who were both opponents of Kant.
In the 1760s, Crusius’ philosophy prevailed
as the philosophy of the Berlin Academy
of Sciences, which was led by Pierre-Louis
Moureau de Maupertuis, who was against
Wolffianism and promoted the ideas of the
French Enlightenment. – MS
Lambert, Johann Heinrich
Johann Lambert was born on 26 August
1728 in Mulhouse. He died of tuberculosis
on 25 September 1777 in Berlin. In his youth,
he worked as secretary of Johann Rudolf
Iselin, who gave him access to his private
library, which contained books by philoso-
phers such as → Wolff, Malebranche and
→ Locke, on which Lambert was taught. In
1756, he travelled around Europe, acting as
tutor for the son and the nephew of Count
von Salis, and all the while meeting philoso-
phers and scientists such as Abraham Gotthelf
Kästner, Pieter van Musschenbroeck, Jean Le
Rond d’Alembert and Charles Messier, who
influenced his mathematical approach to
philosophy.
In his first philosophical essay, the
Criterium veritatis (1761), which was pub-
lished posthumously in 1915, Lambert
sketched out his main philosophical idea
according to which the method of geometry
must be applied to philosophical investiga-
tion to ensure a solid foundation for all phil-
osophical disciplines. Lambert developed this
idea in Über die Methode, die Metaphysik,
Theologie und Moral richtiger zu beweisen
(1762), in Methodus calculandi in logicis
(1763) and in the Neues Organon (1764),
which is his philosophical masterpiece.
The Neues Organon, which is directly
reminiscent of → Aristotle and → Bacon’s
101
works, is divided into four parts, which cor-
respond to the four instruments of the human
mind for finding truth: (1) Dianoiology, i.e.
the doctrine of reasoning; (2) Alethiology,
i.e. the doctrine of truth; (3) Semiotics, i.e.
the doctrine of signs and meanings; (4)
Phenomenology, i.e. the doctrine of appear-
ances. Dianoiology deals with the laws of
thought, which turn all common knowledge
into demonstrative knowledge. According
to Lambert, all syllogisms can always be
reduced to geometric representations, which
make immediately evident whether an argu-
mentation is valid or not.
In the Alethiology, Lambert anatomizes the
human mind in order to find a priori the first
primitive and simple concepts, which consti-
tute the building blocks of knowledge and of
reality. Primitive concepts are such concepts
as ‘will’, ‘consciousness’, ‘existence’, ‘unity’,
‘duration’, ‘succession’, ‘extension’, ‘move-
ment’ and ‘force’. According to Lambert, by
means of these concepts it would be possible,
following → Leibniz’s suggestion, to elaborate
a priori a mathesis universalis, which would
lie at the basis of every rigorous science such
as ontology, geometry, physics, etc.
In the Semiotics, by contrast, Lambert aims
to reduce the doctrine of things to a doctrine
of signs. This is possible because symbolic
cognition is a necessary means for think-
ing in order to make clear the obscure con-
cepts through signs. In the Phenomenology,
Lambert explains how from the appearances
of the world given by sensation it is possible
to find the real laws of nature.
Thanks to the great success of the Neues
Organon and with the help of Leonhard →
Euler and Johann Georg Sulzer, Lambert
obtained a position in 1764 at the prestigious
Berlin Academy of Sciences. In 1764, he wrote
another important work, the Anlage zur
Architectonic, which was however published
Philosophical and Historical Context
only in 1771 in Riga with the help of Kant,
who valued Lambert’s logical project highly.
Even as late as 1800, in JL, Kant praises
Lambert as the greatest innovator in the field
of logic after Aristotle (JL 21).
Lambert’s main project was to apply
mathematical logic, i.e. combinatorics,
to metaphysics, developing further and
improving the failed attempts of logi-
cians such as the brothers Bernoulli and
Gottfried Ploucquet. It is from this particu-
lar perspective that Kant’s relationship with
Lambert must be understood, especially in
connection with the pre-Critical writings
and CPR.
In logic, Lambert’s main objective was
to find an ars characteristica universalis,
which could describe the ontological con-
stitution of reality by means of the combi-
nation of simple and fundamental concepts
(Grundbegriffe) according to their relations.
The effectiveness of the description was
grounded in the analysis of simple concepts,
because every truth was based on funda-
mental concepts, whose possibility and cor-
rectness were immediately understood as
true by the inner sense. Thus, Lambert con-
flated Locke’s and Leibniz’s philosophical
approaches by integrating the fundamental
concepts as the structure of reality itself and
the first concepts of knowledge through
which everything can be known.
Lambert’s project was never completed. In
fact, even in the Anlage zur Architectonic he
examines a number of fundamental concepts
only in outline. He fails to demonstrate how
the combination of these primitive concepts
could describe and constitute the ontological
structure of reality comprehensively.
In the 1760s, Kant was engaged in a
reform of metaphysics inspired by the reform
of mathematics that Lambert had attempted.
However, in Inq, Kant implicitly denies and
102
refutes Lambert’s results for at least three
reasons: (1) in metaphysics there cannot be
a complete analysis of simple concepts; (2)
metaphysics proceeds by analysis, while
mathematics proceeds by synthesis; (3) meta-
physical concepts are given in experience,
while mathematical concepts are ‘arbitrary’
and constructed by the human mind.
However, Kant does not dismiss Lambert’s
project of an architectonic and for a meth-
odology of metaphysics. In 1765, Kant
announces to Lambert that he was work-
ing on a book entitled Proper Method for
Metaphysics (Corr-I 51), which however
was never published. Nevertheless, there
are good reasons to believe that Kant had
Lambert in mind when working on the parts
of CPR that deal with methodology and the
‘Architectonic’. – MS
Further Reading
A. Laywine, ‘Kant in reply to Lambert on
the ancestry of metaphysical concepts’,
Kantian Review 5 (2001): 1–48.
E. Watkins (ed.), Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason. Background Source Materials
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), ch. 6.
Mendelssohn, Moses
They belonged to the same generation: Kant
was born in → Königsberg on 22 April 1724;
Mendelssohn in Dessau on 6 September
1729. They had the same interests, as Kant
confirmed to Mendelssohn in a letter dated
7 February 1766. Dispensing with ‘fashion-
able circumlocutions’, he welcomes corre-
spondence between ‘two persons whose ways
of thinking are, because of the similarity of
 Philosophical and Historical Context
their intellectual concerns and the mutuality
of their principles, in such agreement’ (Corr-I
67–68).46
Both Mendelssohn and Kant had
responded to the essay topic set by the Berlin
Academy of Sciences for 1763 (→ Academy
prize essay) on the reliability of evidence in
metaphysics: Kant’s Inq had come second
to Mendelssohn’s prize-winning Treatise
on Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences. Both
exemplify the philosophical culture of the
Enlightenment  – Kant taking it to its logi-
cal conclusion by revealing in its appar-
ently omnipotent rationalism its constitutive
anthropomorphic limits and Mendelssohn
representing in the life he lived ‘a kaleido-
scope of the European intellectual scene,
Jewish and non-Jewish, in the second half of
the 18th century’.47
Yet, within two decades, Kant and
Mendelssohn faced each other with mutual
incomprehension. Kant was disappointed
that his correspondents in the Prussian capi-
tal (→ Prussia), the centre of the German
Enlightenment, including Mendelssohn,
were apparently confounded by CPR, first
published in 1781, remarking to Schütz
in November 1785 that Mendelssohn’s
Morning-Hours was ‘a masterpiece of the
self-deception of our reason’, ‘this final legacy
of a dogmatizing metaphysics’ (Corr-I 428–
429), although its perspicacity would always
test the principles of the critique of reason.
Mendelssohn, on the other hand, claimed in
a letter to Kant that his poor health prevented
him from engaging with CPR lest it consume
all his ‘nerve-juice’ (Corr-I 308). He was
dismayed, as he noted in the preface to his
Morning Hours or Lectures on the Existence
of God (1785),48 by Kant’s ‘total crushing’ of
metaphysics, and admitted in his last letter to
Kant on 16 October 1785 that, though he no
longer had the strength to read his profound
103
works, he realized that their ‘basic principles
[did] not coincide’ (Corr-I 413).49
The central debates of rationalist meta-
physics, the immortality of the soul and
the existence of God, resisted resolution.
Mendelssohn’s convictions were not, there-
fore, historically superseded by Kant’s critique
of reason, even if Mendelssohn admitted that
his philosophy was ‘no longer the philoso-
phy of the times’.50 Rather their estrange-
ment exposes their different relationship to
philosophy: Kant became a state-appointed
Professor of Metaphysics; Mendelssohn kept
the accounts in Isaak Bernhard’s silk factory.
Kant enjoyed personal security and official
status; Mendelssohn suffered humiliation
and oppression. His secular knowledge was
largely self-taught. While he had come to
Berlin in 1743, he needed special royal per-
mission, granted only in 1763, to reside per-
manently in the capital. One vignette speaks
volumes: the students mocking and jeering at
him while, in 1777 on a visit to Königsberg,
unrecognized he waited with them for Kant
to come and lecture.51
Reluctant though he was to discuss it pub-
licly, Mendelssohn’s commitment to Judaism
sustained his secular activities.52 The first
modern Jew, he intended to exemplify in
his person what the late eighteenth century
called the Jews’ capacity for ‘civic improve-
ment’. Through his association with leading
German writers, especially Lessing, Abbt,
Nicolai and Moritz, his membership of the
eminent philosophical discussion-forum the
Berlin Wednesday Society, his contributions
as a reviewer to prestigious literary and phil-
osophical journals, and not least his writ-
ings on metaphysics, psychology, aesthetics
and political philosophy, Mendelssohn
demonstrated not just his own, pre-eminent
intellectual stature. He was also respond-
ing to a political dispensation that closely
Philosophical and Historical Context
regulated Jews’ involvement in their secular
environment. By showing that Jews were
not inherently destined for an introverted,
ghetto-bound existence, his secular achieve-
ments exposed the life-chances they were
losing.
Conversely, Mendelssohn’s works on
Judaism and Jewish philosophy like his prac-
tical support for Jewish communities sought,
despite the disapproval of the orthodox, to
encourage Judaism to modernize itself. He
focussed on a ‘purified’ Judaism based on
Mosaic Law and on the Pentateuch (which
he published in German translation from
1780 to 1783). Crucially this represented
for him not only a core of religious belief
Judaism ostensibly shared with Christianity
(thereby disarming doctrinal prejudice) but
also a theological position that, like Christian
faith, could be expressed in terms of rational-
ist metaphysics.53
The process of secularization that the
Enlightenment endorsed meant that human
self-understanding would have to manage
with ‘less truth’, with diminished meta-
physical certainty.54 But, as its refutation
of Mendelssohn’s psychological theory in
CPR (in its second edition) shows (B413ff.),
Kant’s reductive method that left issues
such as the immortality of the soul and
the actual existence of God undecidable
did undermine Mendelssohn’s core meta-
physical principles. Mendelssohn already
realized this in 1781, but, unlike for exam-
ple the much younger Salomon Maimon
(1753–1800) a decade later,55 he was indis-
posed to critique Kant’s thinking within a
Judaic context.
For Mendelssohn – as for later European-
Jewish philosophers generally, such as
Marx, Rosenzweig, Bloch and Levinas – eth-
ics shapes epistemology. As Mendelssohn
affirmed in his best-selling Phaedo or On the
104
Immortality of the Soul (1767), any appar-
ently true precept indispensable for human
happiness and social well-being must for that
reason be actually true.56 Under pressure to
justify his own metaphysical-theological posi-
tion, let alone respond to Kant, he powerfully
advocated religious tolerance in Jerusalem
or Religious Power and Judaism (1783) and
deduced the sufficient reason for God’s exist-
ence in Morning-Hours (1785). In ‘Über die
Frage: was heißt aufklären?’ (1784), mindful
surely of his own actual, vulnerable civic sta-
tus, Mendelssohn differentiates between the
‘culturally polished’ citizen and the ‘ration-
ally enlightened’ human being.57
Unlike Kant in E, UH and later in his cri-
tique of Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem (TP 307–
312), Mendelssohn58 refuses to sacrifice the
living individual for the future benefit of the
human species – an insight alone worthy of
a ‘thinker of the highest rank’.59 Conversely,
in OT Kant defended him against Jacobi’s
presumptuous allegations in the ‘pantheism
controversy’ that so distressed Mendelssohn
that they arguably hastened his death on
4  January 1786. Taking issue with Jacobi’s
zealotry, Kant cites Mendelssohn for insisting
in Morning-Hours on the need for ‘healthy
reason’ (OT 133–134) as an epistemological
guide in the realm of metaphysics.60 Though
Mendelssohn would have rejected deducing
this orientating ‘rational belief’ analogically
from geographical navigation and math-
ematical modelling, Kant affirms the basic
ontological need for at least the concept of
a supreme being. It was in his way a fitting
tribute. – MD
Further Reading
R. Munk (ed.), Moses Mendelssohn’s
Metaphysics and Aesthetics (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2011).
 Philosophical and Historical Context
Physical influx
Physical influx was an account of the inter-
action of substances that competed with the
occasionalist view of Malebranche and →
Leibniz’s notion of pre-established harmony.
Physical influx held that substances car-
ried within them forces or powers to imme-
diately influence other substances. Kant’s
early teacher, Martin Knutzen (1713–1751),
defended physical influx and the theory itself
exercised considerable influence upon Kant’s
pre-Critical philosophical development. The
topic of physical influx originally gained cen-
trality as a characterization of the Cartesian
model of mental causation and as an account
of the possible ‘influence’ between men-
tal and extended substances. However, the
model was pursued more generally within
rationalist metaphysics as an account of the
interaction between substances generally.
In his earliest writings, Kant appears to
work within a physical influx framework.
However, as his thought developed his atti-
tude became more clearly critical, and by the
time of the arrival of the Critical philosophy,
Kant rejects physical influx theory altogether
as one belonging to the broad family of
transcendental-realist approaches that Kant
firmly rejects. Most crucially perhaps, physi-
cal influx represents the model of causation
that Kant abandons in favour of his own
transcendental-idealist account outlined in
the Second Analogy.
In ND, Kant claims that there is a ‘harmo-
nious dependence’ (ND 413) that generates
a community of things interacting with each
other. To this extent, Kant holds that those
things, as substances, exert influence upon
each other. However, Kant also maintains
that this relation also ultimately depends
on God as ‘the universal principle of beings’
(ND  413). As such, Kant claims that his
105
position is neither appropriately character-
ized as an ordinary physical influx theory –
he claims it is ‘superior to the popular system’
(ND 416) since it appeals to an external
principle of interaction in the divine – nor as
pre-established harmony theory, since Kant’s
own theory demands the reciprocal depend-
ence of substances upon each other, unlike
the Leibnizian model.
By the time of ID, Kant further distances
himself from physical influence theory,
describing it as one whereby ‘there is an inter-
action of substances and transeunt forces,
which can be cognised by means of their
existence alone’ (ID 407). Here Kant com-
plains that physical influence fails to offer
genuine grounds of explanation and that it
‘is not so much a system as indifference to
all philosophical system’ (ID 407). However,
Kant is arguably still working within a broad
model of physical influx, and is merely criti-
cizing the variants of it put forward by those
such as Knutzen and → Crusius (1715–1775)
whose accounts he deems non-explanatory.
Kant explicitly returns to the topic of
physical influx in the Critical period, in order
to criticize it as a theory of mind–body inter-
action. In the first edition of the Paralogisms
(A390–396), Kant first defends ‘physical
influence’ theory from the criticisms of pre-
established harmony theorists and occasion-
alists, before submitting the theory to his own
transcendental-idealist criticism. Kant claims
that those wishing to modify or improve
the theory of physical influx could only do
so by assuming that matter is not itself an
appearance but instead a thing in itself and
then only by assuming the falsity of immedi-
ate influence between matter as thing in itself
and mind from the outset (A391).
Nevertheless, Kant argues that physical
influx theory itself suffers from the same
‘transcendental dualism’ whereby extended
Philosophical and Historical Context
substances are mistakenly understood as
things in themselves rather than ‘mere rep-
resentations of the thinking subject’ (A392).
Kant’s critical attitude towards attempts
(including prior ones of his own) to resolve
mind–body interaction through an account
of immediate influence is that they founder
on the assumption that the topic is one that
is properly answerable within a metaphysical
programme, whereas the transcendental ide-
alist can provide the explanatory grounds for
human beings’ ultimate inability to provide
an accurate resolution (A393). – JC
Further Reading
E. Watkins, Kant and the Metaphysics
of Causality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), pt. 1.
E. Watkins (ed.), Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason. Background Source Materials
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), ch. 2.
Pietism
Pietism was a religious Protestant move-
ment within the Lutheran Church in early
and mid-eighteenth century Germany, which
reacted against Lutheran orthodoxy, doctri-
nal as well as ecclesiastical, and which gave
rise to an eminently individualist and inward
approach to the Christian faith.
One of the main sources of inspira-
tion of Pietism was Philipp Jakob Spener’s
Pia desideria, published in 1675, in which
among other things Spener argued for ear-
nest Bible study in small groups, the so called
ecclesiolae in ecclesia, for universal priest-
hood (participation of the laity in the reli-
gious service), thus displaying radical social
106
egalitarianism, for the necessity of practical
Christian life, and most importantly, for ser-
mons to be a source of inspiration, instilling
devotion in the inner soul of the Christian,
rather than merely being a display of rhetori-
cal accomplishment.
By nature, Pietism was a very diverse
movement. One of its more extremely enthu-
siastic and even psycho-erotic variants was
the Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine, founded
by Nikolaus Ludwig Graf von Zinzendorf
(1700–1760) in 1722. But in whatever form
it always manifested, to a greater or lesser
extent, an undercurrent of exaltation, mys-
ticism and not uncommonly, theosophy
and even occultism. A chief characteris-
tic of Pietism, however, is the emphasis on
personal experience. Individual ‘conversion’
and ‘awakening’ marked out these so-called
Kernchristen, who congregated in small
local groups notwithstanding the fact that,
beyond their immediate environment, they
felt a universal bond with like-minded fel-
low truly born-again Christians, the spiritual
community of God’s elect, which manifested
Pietism’s strongly anti-institutional ecumeni-
cal nature. Other distinguishing features
of Pietism, in which it strikingly differed
from mainstream Lutheranism, was a cer-
tain amount of chiliasm, the almost exclu-
sive focus on Christology, and a Blut und
Wundentheologie that opposed the perceived
seventeenth-century quietistic distortions of
the reformational doctrine of justification,
and insisted on the supernatural effusion of
the divine life within the soul of the believer,
thus bringing about a rebirth.
In general  – forming the backdrop of
Pietism – the eighteenth-century religious per-
son sought to humanize the transcendence of
God, to subjectivize that which is outside him
and historically distant (e.g. Christ’s death
and resurrection), implying an emphasis on
 Philosophical and Historical Context
the centrality of the present, the concrete and
the personal (‘one’s inner voice’), but also
that he only recognized his fellow human
being insofar as he would recognize himself
in the other. All experience and knowledge of
transcendent authority, all things heterono-
mous or external, he considered in terms of
an experience of something that is only rela-
tively distinct from the human being, and so
must have a place within the purview of the
inner authority of the human being, to which
God speaks directly. This meant the inclusion
of God in the context of sovereign human
self-consciousness and conscience, and the
sublation of transcendence into what is expe-
rienced internally or purely inwardly.
Individuality and inwardness thus become
central tenets of what it means to be a human
being in general. In this respect, Pietism is
intimately connected to the emergence of
the Enlightenment in Germany. The devel-
opment of Pietism must also be seen against
the background of the growing power of the
absolute state and the secular subjugation of
the Church, or at least the more hierarchical-
bureaucratic aspects of the Church, e.g. the
appointment of clergymen (caesaropapism),
while allowing the co-existence of various
religious denominations and leaving the con-
tent of one’s beliefs to each individual’s own
conscience.61 Also the growing centrality of
the middle class and its sense of morality,
and not least the increasing status of science
and philosophy, played a significant role in
the emergence of the individualism of which
Pietism is a clear religious manifestation.
The bourgeoisification and moralization of
the Christian religion meant that faith came
to be regarded as something that must con-
tribute to an inwardly experienceable, but no
less outwardly concretely observable change
in the way one conducts one’s own life, the
praxis pietatis. Christian faith was foremost
107
concerned with the way one gives shape to,
and improves, one’s life, in the here and now.
This expressed the general wish to distance
oneself from all too theoretical or intellectu-
alist approaches to being a Christian, which,
as evidenced in previous ages, resulted all too
often in strife and destructive fervour among
Christians. The Christian bourgeois of the
eighteenth century opposed orthodox theo-
logical theory as unfruitful, if not dangerous.
Mere Christian doctrine does not amount to
Christian faith, without it having relevance
for one’s own life, without it satisfying one’s
own personal needs. True faith means chang-
ing one’s life in accord with doctrine, not
adhering to doctrine for the sake of it. It is
therefore not just critical of all the dialectical
subtleties of theological erudition, but it also
amounts to a positive demand for a practical
employment of Christian creeds. This, how-
ever, often led to a moralistic, even utilitarian
hollowing out of those creeds.
The relation in the academic as well as
public arena between the Pietists and the
Wolffians (rationalists) (→ Königsberg) was
often strained, and although they had very
different outlooks on life and society, this
does not mean that they were always, in
all respects, working in opposite directions.
Both were oriented to changing life practi-
cally, focusing on improving one’s life by
virtue of good works that necessarily ensued
from faith, but the Pietists took care more of
the inward good works, whereas the ration-
alist provided more for the outward ones.
They were in unison, however, against any
form of Christian quietism (though Pietists
were sometimes themselves accused of this).
Furthermore, the Pietists felt only rela-
tively bound by the letter of the Bible and
theological doctrine, namely only to the
extent that they were morally edifying. The
moral principle of leading a good life was
Philosophical and Historical Context
paramount in all one’s religious activities.
Every aspect of one’s faith revolved around
the idea of a natural, rational Christianity,
which was opposed not to revelation or even
mysticism and exaltation (they were consid-
ered perfectly compatible with a rationally
interpreted Christian faith), but to failing
to develop the human being, failing to sub-
ject one’s creeds to the will and agency, and
needs, of the individual, of oneself. For the
eighteenth-century individual, nature was the
totality of objects that were at the disposal of
the will, feeling, and mind of the individual.
For the Pietist, rational Christianity likewise
means a Christianity that is in accord with
the power of, and affirmed by, the human
being himself, who regards the Christian
creeds in terms of his own religious needs.
The main centre of Pietism in → Prussia
was the University of Halle, where A. H.
Francke (1663–1727) propagated Pietistic
ideas. It was from here that Pietism spread
throughout Prussia. The political importance
of Pietism increased when Frederick William
I began relying on Pietists for his socio-polit-
ical reforms in opposition to the conservative
forces in Prussia, which were allied to the
more orthodox elements within Lutheranism.
Francke was a fervent social activist. The
Halleian, that is, Franckeian, variant of
Pietism had a huge impact in Königsberg. The
Collegium Fridericianum, attended by the
young Kant, was first founded as a collegium
pietatis by Theodor Gehr in the spirit of the
Halle Anstalten.62 An important figure in the
intellectual and cultural life of Königsberg,
and from whom Kant received his ‘earliest
religious instruction’,63 was F. A. Schultz,
who was behind the attempt to reconcile
Pietism and Wolffianism, which was effec-
tively banned in Königsberg between 1723
and 1740. One of Kant’s teachers, Martin
Knutzen (1713–1751), himself a Pietist and
108
defender of the theory of → physical influx,
was a student of Schultz.
Among Kant scholars, Kant is often por-
trayed as straightforwardly hostile to Pietism
as he was to religious popular culture, reli-
gious ceremony, or ecclesiastical authority in
general. True, he denounced the often ‘slavish
cast of mind’ (R 184–185n.) of the Pietists,
and their enthusiasm in their ‘fantastic’ belief
of the possibility of experiencing the super-
sensible in terms of the supernatural as the
cause of one’s empirical mystical experience
(R 174; cf. CF 33, 57n.).64 Nevertheless, as
Allen Wood rightly observes, ‘much in Kant’s
conception of true morality and religion
amounts to a rationally purified version of
pietism’.65 It is thus not too fanciful to argue
that the central tenet of Pietism, the emphasis
on moral autonomy and individuality, as well
as the centrality in Pietism of morality and
moral life conduct, appears to have left an
imprint on the young Kant so much so that,
in some more rational form, it influenced his
mature theory of morality. – DS
Further Reading
R. Gawthrop, Pietism and the Making of
Eighteenth-Century Prussia, new edition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006).
Prussia
In 1525, the Protestant Albrecht I of
Brandenburg-Ansbach (1490–1568) united the
remaining territories of the Deutschordensstaat
into the Duchy (Herzogtum) of Prussia. This
Duchy was not recognized by the Emperor of
the Holy Roman Empire of which, as a conse-
quence, it would never form a part.
 Philosophical and Historical Context
Since 1657, Prussia had become entirely
independent from Poland and in 1701
the country had been turned into a king-
dom under the former Elector Friedrich III
(1657–1713) of the house of Hohenzollern,
who in view of the lack of recognition had to
name himself Friedrich I, King in, and not of,
Prussia. Drawing upon the combined power
of a standing army and a modern adminis-
tration system his son Friedrich Wilhelm I
(1688–1740) expanded the territory and
wealth of the kingdom significantly.
Prussia gained international political sig-
nificance eventually under the enlightened
absolute king Friedrich II (1712–1786), bet-
ter known as → Frederick the Great, who
considered himself to be the ‘first servant of
the state’. Frederick the Great carried forward
the reforms of his father mainly by modern-
izing the legal system of the Prussian state.
He abolished torture and also introduced a
relative freedom of the press.
An essential element of the new atmosphere
that Frederick the Great created in Prussia
was his tolerance towards other religions.
Judaism, however, was more or less excluded
from this tolerance. Consequently, under the
reign of Frederick the Great Prussia attracted
many emigrants from all over Europe and
served as an asylum for French Huguenots
too. The flood of emigrants had an impor-
tant positive influence on the enlightened
intellectual climate in Prussia as well as on
the state’s economic growth and prosperity.
Many of Europe’s leading philosophers and
scientists spent some time in Berlin.
Another positive factor was the freedom of
the press introduced by Frederick the Great,
even though it became temporarily restricted
in 1788 as a consequence of the religious
edict from the new Justice Minister Johann
Christoph Wöllner, which lasted  – albeit in
different forms  – until 1797 and affected
109
Kant too. The publication of R in 1793
resulted in Kant being summoned in October
1794 by Wöllner, who made him promise to
refrain in future from publishing and lectur-
ing on matters of religion.66
Mid-eighteenth century Berlin, Prussia’s
powerful political centre, had also devel-
oped into the intellectual centre of Prussia.
Already in 1700, Friedrich I had appointed
the famous Gottfried Wilhelm → Leibniz
to establish the Berlin Academy, which sub-
sequently was reformed by Frederick the
Great in 1744 and renamed as the Académie
Royale des Sciences et Belles Lettres. From
then on, French was the institute’s language
of communication. Also, the king served as
its president in order to further the interests
of the state. This is illustrated by the politi-
cally significant topic of 1777’s essay contest
(→ Academy prize essay), which the king
himself had proclaimed: ‘Does it serve any
purpose to deceive the people?’67
The Prussian educational system reached
its peak with the foundation of the Berlin
University in 1809, soon to become the
standard for the reformation of German
universities into institutions offering both
teaching and research programmes. Prussia’s
most important universities were those of
Halle and → Königsberg. The main assign-
ment of the first was to educate the future
civil servants of the state. The University
of Halle enjoyed an excellent reputation
for its modern law school with among its
staff Christian Thomasius and Christian →
Wolff. Early in the eighteenth century August
Hermann Francke had established in Halle
a revolutionary new educational institution
for educating both boys and girls, called the
Franckesche Stiftungen.
The University of Königsberg, on the
other hand, was one of the first Protestant,
i.e. Lutheran universities in Europe, founded
Philosophical and Historical Context
in 1544 by Albrecht I. Its intellectual climate
was thoroughly influenced by the centrality
of Königsberg as Prussia’s economic power-
house and its status as a trading hub between
Western and Eastern Europe. Many English
and Scottish traders living in Königsberg were
well educated. Joseph Green for instance was
an intimate friend of Kant’s and introduced
him to English literature, philosophy and
politics. He also participated intensively in
the writing process of Kant’s CPR.68 – EOO
School philosophy
In Kant scholarship, the term ‘school phi-
losophy’ usually refers to the discipline and
the doctrines of philosophy as taught at uni-
versities and other places of higher education
in the German speaking areas of Europe in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It
normally does not include Kant himself, on
account of his singular importance in the
history of philosophy. Although in a certain
technical sense Kant could, of course, be con-
sidered to be a school philosopher as well
(but see A838–839=B866–867), the relation-
ship of Kant and school philosophy, in par-
ticular with regard to his predecessors, has
been a topic of considerable debate.
As far as the seventeenth century is con-
cerned,69 the universities – like almost all
other institutions in Germany – were subject
to the after-effects of the Reformation and
Counter-Reformation, ultimately resulting
in a threefold division into Catholic (e.g.
Ingolstadt, Cologne), Calvinist or Reformed
(e.g. Heidelberg, Marburg) and Lutheran
schools (e.g. → Königsberg, Altdorf). Despite
these confessional ramifications, philoso-
phy managed to establish a fair, but vary-
ing degree of independence from theology,
110
and a rather substantial inter-confessional
exchange of ideas prevailed. In general, there
was not just considerable institutional con-
tinuity, but also a continuity of topics dis-
cussed and doctrines held with regard to late
and high Scholasticism. That said, the now
classic figures of early modern philosophy,
who often worked outside of the universities,
received some reception within school phi-
losophy as well.
While a finer distinction within catholic
German school philosophy is indispensable
for a comprehensive account of this move-
ment,70 it may suffice to restrict this brief
overview to the Jesuits, who arguably exerted
the largest overall influence. Of particu-
lar importance was the genre of the cursus
philosophicus,71 i.e. the paradigm textbook
that, while drawing mainly on Aristotelian
sources, provided an outline of the core doc-
trines of the philosophical disciplines with
an emphasis on logic, metaphysics and phys-
ics (the relationship between which is itself
more often than not a problem). In the Jesuit
cursus tradition (represented by, among oth-
ers, Rodrigo de Arriaga [1592–1667]) moral
philosophy was of relatively minor impor-
tance, the pertinent material being based
on the Nicomachean Ethics. This tradition
extended not only to other orders, e.g. the
Franciscans, but also to Protestantism, such
as in Paul Rabe (1656–1713) in Königsberg.
As far as metaphysics is concerned, the cursus
took up the crucial transformation this dis-
cipline had undergone in Francisco Suárez’s
(1548–1617) Disputationes Metaphysicae
(DM), moving away from mere commentary
on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (→ Aristotle).
However, only a relatively small portion
of the material discussed in DM entered into
the respective section of the cursus.72 These
were, for example, the topic of metaphysics
as ens qua ens, the transcendentals, i.e. those
 Philosophical and Historical Context
features of Being transcending the categories
in that they can be found in each category,
and the relationship between Being and mate-
riality. Reflecting tensions between Thomist
and Scotist paradigms, the question of the
analogy vs. the univocity of Being received
broad attention as well as the question as to
how the object of metaphysics is different
from that of logic. Further important rep-
resentatives of seventeenth century Catholic
school philosophy as a whole are Hirnhaim,
Babenstuber, Sannig, and Magni.
Calvinist school philosophy73 underwent
significant Western European influences, in
particular of French and Dutch provenance,
with Petrus Ramus (1515–72) dominating in
the first half, and → Descartes in the second
half of the seventeenth century. A further
trait of Calvinist school philosophy was its
encyclopedic tendency, which exemplified the
consolidating nature of German school phi-
losophy in an almost paradigmatic manner.
With the Ramist conceptions of methodology
and completeness being crucial, metaphysics
– in the sense of examining Being as Being
– did not play the role of a foundational
discipline. When it came to metaphysics, it
was, overall, conceived of rather in terms
of a Christian Neoplatonism (in marked
contrast to the Jesuit, as it were, ontologi-
cal approach) and hence basically as natural
theology. Representatives of Calvinist School
Philosophy are e.g. Goclenius, Keckermann,
Timpler, Alsted, and Clauberg.
Conflicts about the relation between phi-
losophy and theology notwithstanding – as
evidenced by attempts at establishing a so-
called ‘Christosophia’, based ultimately on
revelation – it was the Lutheran German
school philosophers74 of the seventeenth
century who returned to the ontological
conception of Aristotelian metaphysics as a
foundational discipline, with its focus on an
111
account of ens inquantum ens. Given Luther’s
own outspoken hostility towards Aristotle,
this came about as a rather surprising devel-
opment, bringing the Lutherans more or
less in line with the Scotist and Suárezian
tradition.
A particularly interesting philosopher in
this respect is Abraham Calov (1612–86)
who introduced Suárez’s metaphysics in
Königsberg, and who in many ways held
views similar to those of Suárez on a number
of important metaphysical issues. Moreover,
Calov developed philosophical approaches,
which, in the opinion of some commentators
at least,75 are a precursor of sorts to Kant’s
Critical method, for example gnostology and
noology. These relate to Aristotle’s distinction
between the first and second operation of the
intellect and try to account for foundational
concepts and principles respectively. Other
important Lutherans include Scheibler, J. and
C. Martini as well as Scherzer.
With regard to the eighteenth century,76
the distinctions according to confessions
remained very much in place. That said,
controversies between, on the one hand, a
rationalist strand with thinkers such as →
Wolff and → Baumgarten (who as an author
of important textbooks for example in meta-
physics and ethics must perhaps be consid-
ered the author of reference for Kant77) and
an anti-rationalist strand such as Thomasius,
Rüdiger, and → Crusius, on the other,78 were
running through German school philoso-
phy of the eighteenth century as a whole,
sometimes even occurring within these sub-
divisions themselves, for example within the
Lutheran tradition. Again, it is tempting to
gloss over many, often subtle differences,
but it would certainly be a mistake to regard
all rationalists, e.g. Baumgarten, simply as
Wolffians and construe too close an associa-
tion between the non- or anti-rationalists and
Philosophical and Historical Context
more downright religious movements, such
as → Pietism. Moreover, older traditions,
such as Eclecticism and → Aristotelianism,79
the latter particularly at Königsberg univer-
sity, continued to play an important role. In
any event, however, this conflict obviously
foreshadowed Kantian themes insofar as the
anti-rationalists denied what the rationalists
maintained, namely the possibility of tran-
scendent metaphysical knowledge. Here, to
be sure, remnants of an earlier conflict came
into play too, namely that between different
conceptions of metaphysics, i.e. metaphys-
ics as an all-encompassing and foundational
ontology, on the one hand, and as an essen-
tially transcendent discipline covering a very
special realm of entities, on the other.
While it would certainly be an exaggera-
tion to regard the emergence of Kant’s Critical
philosophy entirely as an internal affair of
German school philosophy, the influence
from outside the school tradition altogether,
such as from → Hume, may sometimes be
similarly overstated.
As far as practical philosophy – in particu-
lar ethics – is concerned, seventeenth century
debates were characterized by the tensions
emerging from a predominantly secular out-
look adopted especially in the Aristotelian
(and Stoic) sources, on the one hand, and
the radical nature of some of the Christian
demands with regard to a proper conduct
of human life altogether, on the other. These
demands had been re-emphasized by the
Reformers after basically the same issue had
created similar frictions in academic circles
of the High and late Middle Ages. Suggested
solutions included a division of labour
between those approaches with regard to
the civic, or external, dimension of conduct
and the inner, as it were ‘spiritual’ life respec-
tively, while others insisted that Christian
principles must be applied comprehensively
112
to the entire realm of the practical. Further
tensions were caused by the fact that lawyers,
theologians and philosophers in many cases
claimed to be in charge of basically the same
issues, for example the doctrine of practical
natural law.80
In the eighteenth century debates, a
number of crucial controversies also deserve
close attention as a context for understanding
the development and the structure of Kant’s
moral philosophy. One of those controver-
sies concerned the status and nature of the
will and their implications for normative the-
ory. It is fair to say that here too, traditional
Thomist and Scotist strategies were in a sense
re-run, for example in Wolff’s intellectualism
and Crusius’s voluntarism, with the latter
putting particular importance on the freedom
of the will as a foundational notion. While
this clearly resonates in Kant’s own thought,
other ideas, such as Baumgarten’s emphasis
on obligation as the core concept of morality,
are obviously also pertinent81 – depending, of
course, on how we wish to understand Kant’s
approach in the first place. – WE
Smith, Adam
Kant’s interest in the Scottish moral sense
philosophers is well-known. Kant famously
says that David → Hume woke him from his
‘dogmatic slumber’ and quotes him often. He
also pays tribute at various points to Francis
→ Hutcheson, identifying him at one point
in CPrR as the prime representative of the
moral sentimentalist school (CPrR 40). So
it is unsurprising to find that Kant also read
and respected the third central Scottish moral
sense philosopher, Adam Smith, Hutcheson’s
student and successor, and one of Hume’s
closest friends. Smith’s name rarely appears
 Philosophical and Historical Context
in the main body of Kant’s work, however,
and perhaps for that reason there was until
recently far less discussion of Kant’s rela-
tionship to Smith than of his relationship to
Hume or Hutcheson.
Kant seems to have first read Smith’s
Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) shortly
after it was first translated into German by
Christian Rautenberg, in 1770. In a 1771
letter to Kant, Marcus → Herz writes that
he has heard that ‘the Englishman Smith’
is Kant’s ‘favorite’ (Corr-I 126) among the
Scottish moral sense theorists, and Kant
makes reference to ‘sympathy’ and the
‘impartial spectator’ as alternative founda-
tions for moral judgment – thus, presumably,
contrasting Hume with Smith – in an unpub-
lished note that may have been written as
early as the fall of 1770. Later in the 1770s,
Kant’s unpublished reflections include one
lamenting the fact that no German writers
have treated human moral consciousness
with the insight that Smith shows, and one
that asks of ‘Smith’s system’ why ‘the impar-
tial judge’ (a phrase Smith sometimes uses as
a synonym for ‘impartial spectator’) would
take an interest in the well-being of oth-
ers. Yet another such reflection employs the
notion of the impartial spectator to clarify
the theory of taste. To observe an object from
the point of view of the impartial spectator,
Kant suggests, is the same thing as observing
it from a communal point of view.82 So Kant
clearly read Smith’s TMS.
That he read Smith’s Wealth of Nations
(WN) is in one sense easier to show. He
quotes from the book in two of his published
works, viz. at MM 289 and Anthr 209. But
the passages Kant quotes are relatively dull
ones (on the nature of money, and on sump-
tuary laws), and he may have gotten one
of them from a review of the book in the
Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen, rather than
113
by reading the whole book himself. Whether
or not he read through the book, Kant does
seem to have been one of the first major fig-
ures in Germany to take an interest in WN.
He also quotes from the book in his anthro-
pology lectures of 1785, a point at which it
was not widely known in Germany.83
Aside from these explicit references to
Smith, there are arguably a whole series of
allusions to him scattered throughout Kant’s
work. G discusses the advantages of the
‘division of labor’ in its preface, refers at
another point to a ‘rational impartial specta-
tor,’ and includes a brief but informed dis-
cussion of prices (G 388; 393; 434–435). In
UH, written at more or less the same time as
G, Kant maintains that restrictions on trade
will impede economic growth (UH 27), and
suggests a sort of ‘invisible hand’ picture of
the workings of history, according to which
gains in freedom and well-being come about
by way of natural processes rather than the
conscious efforts of human beings. A simi-
lar view of history and endorsement of the
importance of freedom to economic growth
appear in CBH, from 1786, which in addi-
tion contains a version of the stadial theory
of economic development associated with
Smith and his student John Millar.
Later, in PP, Kant makes remarks on
national debt that look like they may have
come from WN, and endorses a position sim-
ilar to Smith’s on the separation of church
and state in MM. In CF the division of
labour re-appears, as an extended metaphor
for how universities ought to be run.84
Exactly what to make of these remarks
and allusions is hard to say. Some contem-
porary philosophers have suggested that
Smith’s impartial spectator procedure for
moral judgment is closer to Kant’s eth-
ical system than any other position among
the moral sentimentalists.85 Some also see
Philosophical and Historical Context
anticipations of Kant in Smith’s concep-
tion of, and support for, political liberty.86
It is not easy to say whether Kant, if he
is responding to Smith in these respects,
means simply to endorse his views or in
part to criticize them. Kant clearly does
favour a large role for the free market in
economics, but he also thinks governments
should make provisions for the poor. This is
not dissimilar, however, to the view of pol-
itical economy most scholars today attrib-
ute to Smith. Kant’s categorical imperative
can be read as an a priori replacement for
Smith’s impartial spectator procedure, and
the absolute, a priori value he assigns to
humanity could be similarly read as a cri-
tique of Smith’s attempt to establish value
on an entirely empirical basis.
But again, versions of these thoughts can
plausibly be seen in Smith’s own work. It is
hard to say with any great precision how
Kant saw his own writings in relation to
Smith: he does not explicitly discuss Smith
in any extended way. Instead, we have hints
and allusions  – enough for a fascinating
series of speculations about the influence of
the great eighteenth-century Scottish theo-
rist of freedom on the Prussian one, but per-
haps not for any definitive account of that
relationship. – SF
Spinoza, Benedictus (Baruch) de;
SPINOZISM
Kant probably never read Spinoza directly,
but the latter was nevertheless a significant
influence on his thought due to the variants
of Spinozism that rose to popularity follow-
ing the ‘pantheism controversy’ of the 1780s.
From that time onwards, Spinoza’s became
the rival position that, through Kant’s
114
opposition to it, shaped much of his later
philosophy.
Prior to 1785, Spinoza’s philosophy was
castigated as atheism, materialism and fatal-
ism by most in the intellectual mainstream.
For over 100 years, Spinoza’s texts had been
banned and ostentatiously refuted in the
universities, while simultaneously being cir-
culated and celebrated amongst anti-estab-
lishment thinkers. The reasons for this were
Spinoza’s political and religious radicalism,
expressed most powerfully in the Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus (1670) and the seem-
ingly atheistic metaphysics underpinning it,
set out in his major work the Ethics.
Spinoza argues that all being is a single,
infinite substance that is ‘God or nature’.
Recognizing no ontological distinction
between God and the universe, Spinoza
denies transcendence, divine creation, teleol-
ogy, contingency, and free will, arguing that
God is ‘the immanent cause of all things’
which follow necessarily from his nature.
Human beings are finite modes, or proper-
ties, of God, and are wholly determined by
him. Rejecting the God of theism, Spinoza
argues for the illusoriness of organized reli-
gion, advocating a route to true knowledge
of God through rational understanding of
nature. He similarly seeks to reveal the imag-
inary foundations of contemporary politics
and to defend democracy and tolerance on
rational grounds.
His critiques of established power struc-
tures, founded on an apparently atheistic or
pantheistic metaphysics, led his work to being
suppressed by the authorities and admired by
freethinkers. So dangerous was his thought
considered to be, that a published denuncia-
tion of Spinoza was virtually a requirement
of taking up an academic post in the early
eighteenth century (that of Christian → Wolff
being particularly influential).
 Philosophical and Historical Context
The view that Spinoza’s philosophy is
atheistic, fatalistic, dogmatic metaphys-
ics finds expression in some of Kant’s lec-
ture courses and pre-Critical essays. In
these remarks, Kant dismisses Spinozism as
absurd ‘enthusiasm’ rendered harmless by
transcendental critique. What Kant did not
foresee, in 1781, was the surge of interest
in Spinoza that would follow the publica-
tion, in 1785, of Friedrich Jacobi’s Über die
Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn
Moses Mendelssohn. This book, which set
off the ‘pantheism controversy’ of the mid-
1780s, reinstated Spinoza as an intellectually
respectable philosopher, while strongly criti-
cizing his rationalism. For Jacobi, Spinoza’s
atheism proves that rationalist philosophy –
including Kant’s  – cannot be made consist-
ent with faith. Without faith, Jacobi thinks,
philosophy falls into one of two traps: either
Spinozism, affirming rational knowledge of
a single absolute and necessary substance, or
nihilism, denying our knowledge of the abso-
lute. Either way, as he saw it, God, freedom,
and morality were lost.
Kant responded in OT, stressing that
transcendental idealism limits reason and
upholds both freedom and faith, thereby
distancing himself from both Spinoza and
Jacobi. Yet the popularity of Jacobi’s book
and the turn to Spinoza amongst younger
scholars led Kant increasingly to see Spinoza
as a rival and a threat. In Kant’s later texts,
Spinoza takes on the role of the dogmatic
enemy previously played by → Leibniz; yet it
is not the historical Spinoza with which Kant
takes issue so much as his late-eighteenth
century adherents.
Whereas Jacobi took Spinoza to be para-
digmatic of the exaltation of reason over
faith, others saw in his thought the poten-
tial to heal the rift. Thinkers such as J. G. →
Herder sought to rehabilitate Spinoza through
115
Naturphilosophie, suggesting that his natu-
ralistic pantheism was compatible with the
Christian world-view. Herder argued that
Spinoza’s God was the organic force imma-
nent to all natural beings that organized them
providentially and teleologically, thereby rec-
onciling faith with natural science.
Herder’s was the variant of Spinozism to
which Kant was most vehemently opposed.
Kant and Herder had a philosophical prob-
lem in common: how could nature be fully
determined through natural laws, while also
displaying purposiveness in its organiza-
tion? Herder’s response was to argue that
God directs nature from within, according to
a wise plan. ‘Spinozism’ came to name the
view that nature was caused and directed by
divine intelligence within it, a view that Kant
found dogmatic and incoherent.
Kant argued that the idea of God could be
conceived only as an intelligent creator sepa-
rate from nature, and that nature’s purposive-
ness was a function not of nature’s power, but
of our power of judgment. These are the key
arguments of the second half of CJ, impor-
tant not only for solving the problem of pur-
posiveness, but moreover for harmonizing
Kant’s systems of nature and morality. Kant’s
defence against Spinozism is therefore crucial
to the success of the Critique of Teleological
Judgment and to that of CJ as a whole.
In §§72–73 of CJ, we find Kant’s most
explicit refutation of Spinoza. Though
ostensibly a diagnosis of Spinoza’s failure
to account for purposiveness in nature,
it is clear that Kant’s real objection is to
Spinoza’s doctrine of immanent causality.
Kant contends that this does not explain
causality at all, but only the inherence of
accidents in substance. Spinoza’s substance
lacks intentional causality, intelligence, and
contingency, meaning for Kant that it can-
not explain the idea of purposiveness. Yet
Philosophical and Historical Context
the real issue for Kant is Spinoza’s denial
of the idea of God as intentional, external,
and transcendent to creation, for Kant relies
on this idea to reconcile natural determin-
ism with purposiveness. Kant’s aim here is
to show that Spinoza’s anti-theism is unten-
able, because, he suggests, the idea of the
transcendent God is closely related to the
purposiveness that is the principle of reflec-
tive judgment (§§76–77). Furthermore, only
the idea of a transcendent God can ground
our conception of nature as an arena suit-
able for moral action. The ‘special charac-
ter of the human understanding’ (CJ 405)
effectively rules out the notion of Spinoza’s
God.
Kant’s insistence, contra the Spinozists,
that the idea of God includes transcend-
ence and externality, is also a feature of his
final writings in OP. Kant refers frequently
and puzzlingly to Spinoza in this text, some-
times appearing to align Spinoza with his
own transcendental idealism. Though there
is no critical consensus on these passages, it
seems likely that they reflect the influence of
Spinoza on Schelling and the development
of idealism in the early 1800s. In this late
period, Kant continued to see Spinozism as
a rival position to his own, and continued to
object to it as a naturalist philosophy that
leaves no room for God or morality. – BL
Further Reading
F. Beiser, The Fate of Reason. German
Philosophy from Kant to Fichte
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1987), chs 2 and 3.
J. Edwards, ‘Spinozism, freedom, and
transcendental dynamics in Kant’s final
system of transcendental idealism’, in
S. Sedgwick (ed.), The Reception of Kant’s
Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and
116
Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), pp. 54–77.
B. Lord, Kant and Spinozism:
Transcendental Idealism and Immanence
from Jacobi to Deleuze (Basingstoke/New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Notes
1
Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu
Berlin / Académie royale des sciences et belles-
lettres de Prusse.
2
As quoted in ‘Introductions to the translations’
in CE 1, p. lxii.
3
See S. Ebbesen, ‘The Aristotelian commenta-
tor’, in J. Marenbon (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Boethius (Cambridge, 2009),
pp. 34–55.
4
See F. van Steenberghen, La philosophie au
XIIIe siècle, second edition (Louvain/Paris,
1991), pp. 272, 359.
5
See S. Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550.
An Intellectual and Religious History of Late
Medieval and Reformation Europe (New
Haven, 1980), pp. 231–239.
6
See his Disputationes Metaphysicae I.
7
See A. Speer, G. Frank, Der Aristotelismus
in der frühen Neuzeit – Kontinuität oder
Wiederaneignung (Wiesbaden, 2007), pp. 9–16.
8
Rabe is the author of important textbooks
such as Dialectica et analytica: scientiarum
biga utilissima; Commentarius in librum
categoriarum Aristotelis sive primitiae profes-
sionis logico-metaphysicae; Cursus philosophi-
cus; and Methodologia nova atque scientifica
sive tractatus de ordine genuino.
9
See M. Sgarbi, ‘Metaphysics in Königsberg
prior to Kant (1703–1770)’, /Trans/Form/
Ação/ 33 (2010): 31–64.
10
See M. Sgarbi, La Kritik der reinen Vernunft
nel contesto della tradizione logica aristotelica
(Hildesheim, 2010).
11
Antoine Arnauld & Pierre Nicole, Logic or the
Art of Thinking, ed. J. V. Buroker (Cambridge,
1996).
12
Locke, An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford,
1975), 2.1.2, p. 104; hereafter ECHU.
 Philosophical and Historical Context
13
Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding, ed. T. L. Beauchamp (Oxford,
1999), 2.5; hereafter EHU.
14
E.g. A854=B882 and LM 761ff.
15
E.g. A471=B499, A854=B882, and LM 763.
16
LM 232, LM-M/V 763, LM 542, and
LM-M/V 950.
17
See LM-M/V 763 and A854–855=B882–883.
18
F. D. Preuss (ed.), Oeuvres de Frédéric le Grand
(Berlin, 1854), vol. X, p. 415.
19
L. W. Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant
and his Predecessors (Bristol, 1996), p. 10.
20
See W. Krauss, Studien zur deutschen und
französischen Aufklärung (Berlin, 1963), p. 69.
21
J. G. Hamann, ‘Metacritique on the Purism of
Reason’, trans. K. Haynes, in J. Schmidt (ed.),
What is Enlightenment? (Berkeley/Los Angeles,
1996), p. 166.
22
F. D. Preuss (ed.), Oeuvres de Frédéric le
Grand, vol. XXV, p. 226.
23
See also TP 299–303, PP 381–383; cf. Refl 8043.
24
See TP 299–300; cf. Refl 8051.
25
C. Garve, ‘review of Critique of Pure Reason’,
in B. Sassen (ed.), Kant’s Early Critics:
The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical
Philosophy (Cambridge, 2000), p. 75.
26
See K. Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of
Autonomy (Cambridge, 2000), for a lengthy
discussion of the effect of this characterization.
27
See F. Beiser, German Idealism: the Struggle
against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge,
2002), ch. 5.
28
See further the essay ‘First Responses to the
Critique of Pure Reason: the 1780s and Later’, this
volume.
29
I. Berlin, ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, in I. Berlin,
Against the Current (Harmondsworth, 1979),
1–24. See also I. Berlin, ‘Herder and the
Enlightenment’, in I. Berlin, The Proper Study
of Mankind, ed. H. Hardy, R. Hausheer (New
York, 1998), pp. 359–434.
30
R. Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben und
seinen Werken, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1877/1885).
31
Lessing’s translation of A System of Moral
Philosophy (1755) was published in 1756;
Kant owned 1760 and 1762 translations of
An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the
Passions and Affections. With Illustrations on
the Moral Sense (1728) and of An Inquiry into
the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue;
In Two Treatises (1725).
117
32
D. Henrich, ‘Hutcheson und Kant’, Kant-
Studien 49 (1957/1958): 49–69.
33
It is worth emphasizing that Henrich’s paper
is based almost exclusively on an analysis of
posthumously published Reflexionen (Refl)
and remarks (Obs-R); Hutcheson is mentioned
by name in these only once (Refl 6634).
34
See G. Tonelli, ‘Conditions in Königsberg and
the making of Kant’s philosophy’, in A. J.
Bucher et al. (eds), Bewusst-sein (Bonn, 1975),
pp. 126–127.
35
See M. Sgarbi, Logica e metafisica nel
Kant precritico. L’ambiente intellettuale di
Königsberg e la formazione della filosofia
kantiana (Frankfurt, 2010), pp. 84–91.
36
See R. Pozzo, ‘Aristotelismus und Eklektik in
Königsberg’, in H. Marti, M. Komorowski (eds),
Die Universität Königsberg in frühen Neuzeit
(Cologne/Weimar/Vienna, 2008), pp. 175–178.
37
See G. Tonelli, The Critique of Pure Reason
within the Tradition of Modern Logic
(Hildesheim, 1994); cf. M. Sgarbi, La Kritik der
reinen Vernunft nel contesto della tradizione
logica aristotelica (Hildesheim, 2010).
38
G. Tonelli, ‘Conditions in Königsberg’, p. 132.
39
Ibid.
40
See A. Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus (Bonn,
1844), vol. II, p. 290.
41
See E. Riedesel, Pietismus und Orthodoxie in
Ostpreußen. Auf Grund des Briefwechsels G. F.
Rogalls und F. A. Schultz’ mit den Halleschen
Pietisten (Königsberg, 1937), p. 30.
42
See G. von Selle, Geschichte der Albertus-
Universität zu Königsberg in Preußen
(Würzburg, 1956), pp. 139–140.
43
See J. J. Fehr, ‘Ein wunderlicher nexus rerum’.
Aufklärung und Pietismus in Königsberg unter
Franz Albert Schultz (Hildesheim, 2005).
44
See R. Pozzo, ‘Aristotelismus und Eklektik in
Königsberg’, in H. Marti, M. Komorowski
(eds), Die Universität Königsberg in der frühen
Neuzeit (Cologne, 2008), p. 182.
45
See W. Stark, ‘Wo lehrte Kant? Recherchen
zu Kants Wohnungen’, in J. Kohnen (ed.),
Königsberg. Beiträge zu einem besonderen
Kapitel der deutschen Geistesgeschichte des 18.
Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt, 1994), p. 88.
46
Kant’s word for ‘agree’, einstimmig, connotes
‘speaking with one voice’.
47
A. Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn. A
Biographical Study (London, 1973), p. xiii.
Philosophical and Historical Context
48
Moses Mendelssohn, Morgenstunden oder
Vorlesungen über das Dasein Gottes, in
Gesammelte Schriften. Jubiläumsausgabe,
ed. F. Bamberger et al. (Stuttgart, 1971ff.),
vol. III.2, pp. 1–175, here p. 3; hereafter JA,
­followed by volume and page numbers.
49
See M. L. Davies, Marcus Herz and the End of
the Enlightenment (Detroit, 1995), pp. 36–38.
50
Mendelssohn, Morgenstunden, JA, III.2, p. 4.
51
Mendelssohn, Morgenstunden oder
Vorlesungen über das Dasein Gottes. Der
Briefwechsel Mendelssohn – Kant, ed.
D. Bourel (Stuttgart, 1979), pp. 252–253.
52
Mendelssohn, Schreiben an den Herrn
Diakonus Lavater (1770), JA, VII, p. 8.
53
Mendelssohn, Jerusalem oder über religiöse
Macht und Judentum, JA, VIII, pp. 156ff.,
164–166, 191ff.
54
H. Blumenberg, Säkularisierung und
Selbstbehauptung (Frankfurt a/M, 1974), p. 239.
55
See for more on Maimon the essay ‘First
Responses to the Critique of Pure Reason: the
1780s and Later’, this volume.
56
Mendelssohn, Phädon oder über die
Unsterblichkeit der Seele, JA, III.1, p. 88.
57
Mendelssohn, ‘Über die Frage: was heißt auf­
klären?’, JA, VI.1, pp. 117–118.
58
Mendelssohn, Jerusalem oder über religiöse
Macht und Judentum, JA, VIII, pp. 163–164.
59
N. Hinske, ‘Das stillschweigende Gespräch:
Mendelssohn und Kant’, in M. Albrecht, E. J.
Engel, N. Hinske (eds), Moses Mendelssohn
und die Kreise seiner Wirksamkeit (Tübingen,
1994), p. 155.
60
See also Kant’s letter to Schütz from November
1785 (Corr-I 428–429).
61
This forms the background of the notorious
religious edicts by J. C. Wöllner (1732–1800)
under Frederick William II, in which Kant
also became embroiled in the 1790s, which
were often regarded as a demonstration of
a conservative censure of Enlightenment but
were arguably more intended to counteract
the proliferating anarchy of often quite radi-
cally heterodox religious opinions and beliefs
among both the Lutheran laity and clergy.
See the excellent account of the history of
Wöllner’s policies and Kant’s relation to it,
B. Stangneth, ‘Introduction’ to I. Kant, Religion
innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft
(Hamburg, 2003), pp. xvii–lix.
118
62
M. Kuehn, Kant. A Biography (Cambridge,
2001), p. 36.
63
M. Kuehn, Kant. A Biography, p. 37.
64
See further especially Kant’s extremely
interesting account of the metaphysical
antinomies that mystical theories of moral
regeneration lead to at CF 53–60. Kant
acknowledged the rational nature of the
‘problem’ that Pietists threw ‘in the path of
the orthodox’, namely how ‘to make us other
human beings’ rather than ‘merely better
human beings’, but he criticized the ‘mysti-
cal’ nature of their solution for a ‘moral
metamorphosis’.
65
A. Wood, ‘Introduction’, I. Kant, Religion and
Rational Theology (Cambridge, 2001) (CE 6),
p. xii. Cf. J. Hare, The Moral Gap. Kantian
Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance
(Oxford, 1997), pp. 48–60. See Kuehn, Kant.
A Biography, pp. 40ff. for a more pessimistic
evaluation of the influence of Pietism on the
mature Kant.
66
See Kant’s letter to king Frederick William II
of 12 October 1794 (Corr-II 527–530). On the
edict see U. Wiggermann, Woellner und das
Religionsedikt: Kirchenpolitik und kirch-
liche Wirklichkeit im Preußen des späten 18.
Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 2010).
67
An edition of the prize question has
recently been published in Nützt es dem
Volke, betrogen zu werden? Est-it utile au
peuple d’être trompé? Die Preisfrage der
Preußischen Akademie für 1780, ed. H. Adler
(­Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 2007).
68
Cf. M. Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge,
2001), 154ff.
69
With regard to seventeenth century German
school philosophy, this article is based on the
most comprehensive account of it available,
namely H. Holzhey, W. Schmidt-Biggemann
(eds), in cooperation with V. Mudroch, Die
Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. 4, Das
Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation.
Nord- und Ostmitteleuropa (2 vols) (Basel,
2001), vol. 1, pp. 291–606, esp. the con-
cise outline in Walter Sparn, ‘Einleitung’, in
Holzhey, Schmidt-Biggemann (2001), pp.
293–295. With regard to university history, see
N. Hammerstein, ‘Die Universitäten. Geschichte
und Struktur’, in Holzhey, Schmidt-Biggemann
(2001), pp. 295–302.
 Philosophical and Historical Context
70
See P. R. Blum et al., ‘Die Schulphilosophie
in den katholischen Territorien’, in Holzhey,
Schmidt-Biggemann (2001), pp. 302–391.
71
See Blum, pp. 313–330.
72
See the account in Blum, pp. 325–330.
73
See Schmidt-Biggemann, ‘Die Schulphilosophie
in den reformierten Territorien’, in Holzhey,
Schmidt-Biggemann (2001), pp. 392–474, esp.
p. 395.
74
See W. Sparn, ‘Die Schulphilosophie in
den lutherischen Territorien’, in Holzhey,
­Schmidt-Biggemann (2001), pp. 475–606, esp.
pp. 487–493.
75
See e.g. M. Sgarbi, Logica e metafisica nel
Kant precritico. L’ambiente intellettuale di
Königsberg e la formazione della filosofia kan-
tiana (Frankfurt a/M, 2010), pp. 57–64.
76
See, for the following as well, W. Röd, Die
Philosophie der Neuzeit 2. Von Newton bis
Rousseau (Munich, 1984), pp. 235–296.
77
See C. Schwaiger, Alexander Gottlieb
Baumgarten – ein intellektuelles Portrait:
Studien zur Metaphysik und Ethik von Kants
Leitautor (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 2011).
78
With regard to this controversy, cf. also M.
Wundt, Die deutsche Schulphilosophie im
Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Tübingen, 1945), and
L. W. Beck, Early German Philosophy. Kant
and His Predecessors (Cambridge, MA, 1969),
pp. 243–305.
79
See G. Tonelli, Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason within the Tradition of Modern Logic
(Hildesheim, 1994), passim.
80
See, also with regard to practical philosophy in
general, W. Sparn, ‘Die Schulphilosophie in den
lutherischen Territorien’, pp. 495–497.
81
This has been emphasized recently by C.
Schwaiger, Kategorische und andere Imperative.
Zur Entwicklung von Kants praktischer
Philosophie bis 1785 (Stuttgart-Bad-Cannstatt,
1999), against the traditional view of Crusius’s
main role in leading Kant away from Wolff’s
eudaimonism.
82
See Refl 6628, 1355, 6864, and 767 respec-
tively. See further S. Fleischacker, ‘Philosophy
in moral practice: Kant and Adam Smith’,
119
Kant-Studien 82,3 (1991): 249–269, which
is the first article-length treatment of the
relationship between the two figures since A.
Oncken, Adam Smith und Immanuel Kant
(Leipzig, 1877). The Reflexionen had not been
published when Oncken wrote, however, so
the hard evidence for Smith’s influence on
Kant was limited to the Herz letter. This made
it necessary for Oncken to treat the possibility
that Smith influenced Kant as a mere specula-
tion. Subsequent scholars – e.g. W. Eckstein, in
his introduction to his 1926 German transla-
tion of TMS, and D. Raphael and A. Macfie,
in their introduction to their 1976 edition of
TMS – followed Oncken, and were therefore
also hesitant to make any strong claims about
Smith’s importance to Kant. We can be con-
siderably more confident about such claims
today.
83
Although WN was published in 1776, it did
not become well-known in Germany (as in
many other places) until the 1790s. See the dis-
cussion of reception of WN in Germany, as well
as the passages in Kant that refer to WN, in S.
Fleischacker, ‘Values behind the market: Kant’s
response to the Wealth of Nations,’ History of
Political Thought 17,3 (1996): 379–407.
84
For discussion of all these texts, see again
S. Fleischacker, ‘Values behind the market’.
85
See S. Fleischacker, ‘Philosophy in moral
practice’, but see also S. Darwall, ‘Sympathetic
liberalism: recent work on Adam Smith’,
Philosophy and Public Affairs 28,2 (1999):
139–164; S. Darwall, ‘Equal dignity in Adam
Smith’, in Adam Smith Review I (2004):
129–134; L. Montes, Adam Smith in Context
(Basingstoke/New York, 2004), ch. 4; M. A.
Carrasco, ‘Adam Smith’s reconstruction of
practical reason’, Review of Metaphysics 58,1
(2004): 81–116; and C. Fricke, H.-P. Schütt
(eds), Adam Smith als Moralphilosoph (Berlin/
New York, 2005).
86
See A. Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge,
2009) and S. Fleischacker, A Third Concept of
Liberty: Judgment and Freedom in Kant and
Adam Smith (Princeton, 1999).
 3
SOURCES AND INFLUENCES
This chapter consists of a compilation of
short essays on various philosophers and
thinkers who can be seen to have directly
influenced Kant’s thinking. Leading figures
such as Newton and Euler are included, from
the world of science and mathematics, along
with central philosophical figures such as
Leibniz and Locke. The essays convey a sense
of just how wide and varied the sources and
influences which helped shape Kant’s phi-
losophy were – from his pre-Critical period,
right up to and after the time of the publi-
cation of the Critique of Pure Reason. With
some of the entries a list of further reading is
provided that will enable the reader to under-
take further research. – NH/DS
Aristotle
Establishing the correspondence as well as
the substantial differences between Kant and
Aristotle rests to a large extent upon an eval-
uation of the historical context in which both
their philosophical projects arose. For Kant,
the rationalist conception of metaphysics,
psychology and morality, was a historical
given. Furthermore, → Ηume, who famously
woke Kant from his ‘dogmatic slumber’,
121
exercised an unquestionable influence on
the development of the Critical philosophy.
In Aristotle’s case, on the other hand, it was
his critique of → Plato’s doctrine of Ideas as
well as scepticism that crucially informed
his own philosophical views. The focus of
Aristotle’s metaphysics and theory of knowl-
edge, chiefly articulated in the Categories
and the Metaphysics, lies in his doctrine of
substance, which is based on his view regard-
ing the relation between language and real-
ity. His psychology, presented in On the Soul,
which is both a theory of knowledge and an
anthropology, is directly linked up with his
doctrine of substance.
To determine the difference with Kant, it
is important to notice that Aristotle’s notion
of ‘substance’ is not a metaphysical concept
that is part and parcel of the necessary stock
of human faculties of the mind. Only in the
course of the modern history of philoso-
phy has the notion of ‘substance’ acquired
the connotation of an adequate concept
whose meaning is obvious. In → Descartes,
→ Spinoza and → Leibniz it is quite under-
standable how their interpretations of the
concept of ‘substance’ led to the edifices of
their respective foundationalist programmes.
Kant’s thought is, in essence, a reaction
to the debate between the empiricists and
Sources and Influences
rationalists, in particular in regard to the
use of such metaphysical concepts as ‘sub-
stance’ and ‘cause’. He deems it necessary
to subject the function and, accordingly, the
use or applicability of the concept of ‘sub-
stance’ and other pure concepts to a Critical,
transcendental-philosophical examination.
What makes Kant’s account different from
Aristotle’s is mostly due to the simple fact
that, for Aristotle, ‘substance’ is not prima-
rily a concept that requires either empiri-
cal or metaphysical application. Rather, in
Aristotle, the term ‘substance’ or ‘ousia’ is
used (1) to make explicit the relation between
language or thought, on the one hand, and
reality, on the other, in order subsequently
to (2) clarify issues relating to the perceived
abstractness and alleged independence of the
ideas, which played such a fundamental role
in Plato’s thought.
Aristotle uses the term ‘ousia’ in two ways.
First, in the sense of the real (subject) to which
an enunciation relates in contrast to, second,
the subject term in a proposition which is
nothing but the form in which the ‘real’ is
expressed. In this context, the term ‘hypokei-
menon’ is also important in terms of its play-
ing a supporting role; it is the substrate, the
‘underlying’, about which something is assert-
ed.1 Aristotle’s analysis is notably concerned
with differentiating what is in fact intrinsically
connected: the subject term in a proposition
and the reality that is enunciated by it. In a
sense, Aristotle’s method is descriptive rather
than positing or seeking to determine a meta-
physical foundation. It thus concerns a form of
reflection which from the start remains in the
immediacy of the relation between language
and reality. This is different from the position
of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, which
is in fact characterized by a certain distance
from the immediacy of what is given (in inten-
tione obliqua instead of in intentione recta).
122
In Aristotle’s view, ‘ousia’, later called
‘essence’ or ‘substance’ because of what is
implied by the supporting term ‘hypokei-
menon’, points to ‘relation’ and the terms
describing a relation. Aristotle’s notion of
substance is therefore entirely different in
nature from the metaphysical conception of
substance, which acquired the meaning of
‘that which exists in and of itself’, and con-
stitutes the basic tenet of rationalist founda-
tionalism. In connection herewith, Aristotle
also crucially distinguishes between con-
cepts, which are always abstract and univer-
sal, and the real essence of a thing. A concept
never has real meaning just by virtue of itself,
which is exactly why Aristotle is dissatisfied
with Plato’s realm of Ideas that are separate
from the real world. In Aristotle’s view, the
difference between particulars and their
essences need not result in an independent
sphere or realm of Ideas.
Aristotle’s method rests on a procedure of
differentiation, much more than is the case in
later traditions in philosophy. This particular
method plays an important role also in the
Physics, where he makes use of the multi-
dimensional concept of ‘causality’, which is
at the same time not restricted to ‘efficient
causality’.
It may be said that the problem of the
objectivity of human knowledge first arose
as a result of the disappearance of the tech-
nique that Aristotle introduced in order to
make the relationship between language and
reality explicit – this occurred most probably
already with the arrival of Stoicism, but later
Christian, metaphysical motifs have certainly
played a pivotal role in this. There is a crucial
difference between the sense and function
of the categories with Aristotle, for whom
they are concerned with ‘ways of asserting’,
and later, more ontological interpretations
of categories as ‘ways of being’ in terms of

e.g. ‘substance’ and ‘accidens’ being forms
in themselves. Aristotle sees the categories
as from the outset connected with some-
thing as a concrete particular, a ‘this here’.
Accordingly, ‘location’ and ‘time’ play a con-
crete role in an assertion or judgment.
Kant, on the other hand, keeps a critical
distance from the immediate, concrete in
order to make explicit the necessary formal
structure of finite human knowledge. Kant
concentrates on both the formal aspects of
sensible intuition and the forms of thought,
to which he gives the Aristotelian label of
‘categories’ (CPR A79–80=B105), in contrast
to – and in this sense Kant is more indebted
to Plato – the ideas of reason, which are far
removed from human experience.
There is a likeness of sorts between Kant
and Aristotle in the way that both mark time
in their painstaking analyses of the forms of
knowledge, although the dynamics of analysis
obviously differ. Importantly, however, Kant
sees knowledge as resulting from the synthesis
of given representations, which as so deter-
mined, as unified, first constitute, formally, an
object. ‘Object’, then, corresponds with what
is thought as ‘determined’ (cf. the definition
of object at B137 in CPR). In Kant’s account,
the concept of ‘synthesis’, or ‘synthetic unity
of apperception’, plays a crucial role and is
closely linked to the function of the under-
standing. The most important reason why
synthesis only first comes up with the account
of the understanding and in fact defines
‘thought’ for Kant lies in the fact that, from
the perspective of transcendental philosophy,
one must start out from the object such as it is
given in sensible intuition, viz. as a manifold
of representations. Within the architectonic of
Kant’s system of thought, the principle of the
unity of synthesis is contrasted with the mani-
fold data in sensible intuition, which forms
the empirical basis of knowledge.
123
Sources and Influences
By contrast, Aristotle sees no reason to
connect synthesis to the understanding, for
the sensed phenomenon is directly presented
in sensibility as sensible awareness of unity.
The thing we perceive is present before us by
virtue of its distinguishable types of impres-
sions (colour, sound and form), which are
received simultaneously in our capacity for
external perception. The impressions of a
sensed thing are directly present and col-
lectively constitute the thing we hold to be
present before us. The fact of synthesis (unity)
is incontrovertible and not explainable by the
understanding alone, as it is for Kant. The
perception of concrete things or particulars,
in their spatiality, goes hand in hand with the
structural features of the natural life-world,
which is reflected by the human being as a
spontaneously moving, living being. The
involvement of the understanding is then but
a reflection of the object’s own form that is
an integral part of its ‘essence’.
In Aristotle, synthesis and structure thus
rest on an a priori that is of an entirely dif-
ferent nature from Kant’s conception of the
synthetic a priori. Aristotle takes reality as
primordially alterable and moving, which
comports with taking the natural life-world
and the human perspective within that con-
text as the starting point for an analysis of
nature, society and the moral life. Therefore,
a sense of immediacy forms the basis of
Aristotle’s inquiry.
This can also be seen from Aristotle’s
account in the Physics and its typical
explanations of kinds of movement, in the
structure of the world as both earthly and
heavenly spheres, and in the frequent ref-
erence to final causality or teleology in
order to explain phenomena which in later
philosophical traditions came to be seen as
entirely explainable mechanically. From the
perspective of these later accounts, ‘finality’
Sources and Influences
or ‘purposiveness’ can then no longer be
regarded as eo ipso objective. The shift takes
place when teleology begins to be regarded
as a form of projection, whereby the human
being projects the structure of his own per-
spective onto nature. In Kant, this results in
critically departing from any type of explana-
tion of reality or nature in terms of a neces-
sary organic-systematic unity among natural
phenomena. Purposiveness is then only rela-
tive to our own subjective perspective, as
Kant points out in his account in CJ.
Similarly, Aristotle’s ethics rests on a view
of the natural recognizability of the good, of
virtues that naturally belong to the human
striving towards perfection. This changes
with the loss of immediacy in modern philos-
ophy. In Kant, the question of the objectivity
of moral judgment arises, while at the same
time the autonomy of the human being must
be preserved. Kant’s answer lies in the notion
of rational self-legislation, which is not based
on the value of ‘natural’ virtues as such. The
natural pursuit of happiness no longer has
an inner moral meaning for Kant, although
the hope for happiness has not entirely been
eradicated from the moral and religious
perspective. – KJB/DS
Further Reading
S. Engstrom, J. Whiting (eds), Aristotle, Kant
and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and
Duty (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996).
O. Höffe, ‘Ethik ohne und mit Metaphysik.
Zum Beispiel Aristoteles und Kant’,
Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung
61,4 (2007): 405–422.
H. Seidl, Sein und Bewußtsein: Erörterungen
zur Erkenntnislehre und Metaphysik in
einer Gegenüberstellung von Aristoteles
und Kant (Hildesheim: Olms, 2001).
124
Bacon, Francis
The Great Instauration is the name Francis
Bacon (1561–1626) gave to his monumen-
tal effort to reform natural philosophy into
a practical science. According to its plan, the
project was to consist of six parts. The first
of these was intended by Bacon to provide
an overview and classification of the extant
sciences. The second part was intended to
detail the proper method of scientific investi-
gation. Complementing the second, the third
part was intended to provide the material
for practical knowledge in the form of his-
tories, natural and experimental. Bacon also
intended to supply, in the fourth part of the
Great Instauration, examples for guidance
in the application of the new method. The
fifth part was intended to present an inven-
tory of provisional truths discovered not
through the new method, but with the ordi-
nary method of inquiry and discovery. The
sixth part of the project, what Bacon called
‘Second Philosophy’, or ‘Practical Science’,
was intended to present and expound the
truths discovered by the new method of sci-
ence thus supplanting the fifth part and,
indeed, all ill-begotten ‘truth’.
Although Bacon had been working on it
since at least 1592, the material he had pro-
duced at the time of his death in 1626 was
not enough to complete the project, nor any
single part thereof. The first three parts are
most nearly complete, only fragments exist of
parts four and five, and part six seems never
to have even been begun by Bacon. Of the first
three, the second part is the most important,
not just philosophically, but also historically.
The material for the second part of the
Great Instauration was provided by Bacon in
1620,2 consisting of two books of aphorisms
(although it is clear that he intended more):
of the nine major topics introduced in the

second half, only the first of seven that are
relevant to this part of the project is treated
in the remainder of the volume. Book I offers
an unembellished examination of what he
famously calls idols or false notions (idola),
which ‘not only block [people’s] minds so that
it is difficult for truth to gain access, but even
when access has been granted and allowed
[. . .] offer resistance and do mischief’.3
The ‘Idols of the Tribe’ are intellectual
weaknesses generally inherent in human
nature. These weaknesses include the ten-
dency to suppose more order in nature than
there actually is; the disposition of the mind
to be misled by the errors and dullness of the
senses; the mind’s tendency to ignore excep-
tions to generally accepted principles; to be
influenced by the emotions; and to continue
in a direction of thought for which there is
no evidence for doing so.
The ‘Idols of the Cave or Den’ are personal
prejudices and biases. While some people are
obsessed with the details, others are obsessed
with the whole. While some look for differ-
ences, some look for similarities.
The ‘Idols of the Marketplace’ are ten-
dencies to err due to the bewitchment of the
mind by language. These are the most power-
ful idols: not only does reason affect words,
but words also affect reason.
The ‘Idols of the Theater’ are tendencies
to accept fictional systems of knowledge
based on traditional but mistaken styles of
learning. Bacon identifies and criticizes three
systems of scientific knowledge in particu-
lar. The ‘Sophistical system of philosophy’,
prevalent among what he calls the ‘Rational
School of philosophers’, is based upon a weak
empirical foundation: rational philosophers,
such as → Aristotle, too hastily leave the
realm of experience without duly ascertain-
ing and diligently examining its data. ‘The
Empirical system of philosophy’ is based on
125
Sources and Influences
an empirical foundation that is too narrow:
empirical philosophers duly ascertain and
diligently examine empirical data, although
the data examined are of insufficient quan-
tity and quality. ‘The Superstitious system of
philosophy’ is constructed through a mixture
of philosophy with theology and traditions.
The Great Instauration requires that these
idols be recognized and eradicated. In addi-
tion, it requires a new method through which
it is possible to interpret, as opposed to antici-
pate, nature. In Book II of the New Organon,
Bacon presents the method of what he calls
‘true induction’.4
Figuring prominently in this method are
‘illuminating experiments’ (experimenta
lucifera). Illuminating experiments are dis-
tinguished from ‘fruit-bearing experiments’.
The purpose of the latter is practical: to use
nature for human ends. By contrast, the pur-
pose of illuminating experiments is theoreti-
cal, namely to provide the critical instance or
facts necessary to decisively decide between
equally plausible hypotheses. Hence, they
should be conducted at theoretical crossroads
where the correct path is indeterminate.
As a lifelong student of natural phi-
losophy, and one who owned a copy of the
New Organon, Kant was no doubt familiar
with the aim and method of Bacon’s Great
Instauration. To be sure, Kant’s aim in CPR
is unmistakably Baconian; its motto (Bii),
which draws explicit attention to a new
beginning in scientific inquiry, is taken from
the Preface to the New Organon.
What is more, Kant’s method in the same
way ‘imitates’ Bacon’s new scientific method.
Kant undertakes an ‘illuminating experiment’,
presented in the Antinomy of Pure Reason in
CPR, in order to establish the facts neces-
sary to decisively determine the correctness
of the doctrine of transcendental idealism
over against the doctrine of transcendental
Sources and Influences
realism. This is the experiment of pure rea-
son that Kant first introduces in his preface
to the second edition of CPR. – BFS
Further Reading
S.-H. Kim, Bacon und Kant (Berlin/New York:
de Gruyter, 2008).
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten was born
in Berlin on 17 July 1714. He was educated
in Berlin by Martin Georg Christgau, who
taught him Hebrew and Latin poetry. In
1727 he moved to Halle an der Saale to study
at the Waisenhaus under the direction of the
Pietist pedagogue August Hermann Francke.
In 1730, Baumgarten was enrolled in the
University of Halle, where he studied theol-
ogy and fine arts. During his university years,
he became acquainted with Wolffian philoso-
phy (→ Wolff), of which he was an original
interpreter, but not a follower, for all of his
life. He died on 26 May 1762.
With his Meditationes philosophicae de
nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (1735),
Baumgarten founded a new philosophical
discipline of aesthetics as the science of sen-
sible knowledge. In 1739, he published his
Metaphysica, which made him, at least accord-
ing to Kant, the ‘deepest’ metaphysician of
his time. He also published the Aesthetica in
1750, the Initia philosophiae practicae primae
in 1760, and the Acroasis logica in 1761.
Baumgarten is probably the philosopher
who had the single biggest influence on Kant,
who for more than 40 years used his hand-
books for his lectures on metaphysics, ethics
and anthropology. Baumgarten’s influence is
particularly evident in Kant’s metaphysical
and aesthetic terminology.
126
A first impact of Baumgarten’s terminol-
ogy can be found in ND, from 1755, when
Kant deals with the problem of existence and
essence (ND 76). Kant criticizes Baumgarten’s
notion of ‘existence’ because it is not distin-
guishable from the concept of the ‘possible’,
being the complement of essence according to
all internal possibilities. Kant states that for
existence not only all internal possibilities are
necessary but also all the external ones, namely
relations. In Baumgarten, the determination
of all internal and external possibilities is the
omnimoda determinatio, which corresponds
to Kant’s notion of individual existence.5 Also
NM shows Baumgarten’s influence in the use
of the concepts of ‘something’ as equivalent
to ‘cogitabile’ and ‘nihil negativum’ as ‘irre-
praesentabile’ (NM 171–172).
Kant recurs to this terminology in CPR
when he defines the concepts of ‘some-
thing’ and ‘nothing’, which is based on §7 of
Baumgarten’s Metaphysica:
The highest concept with which one is
accustomed to begin a transcenden-
tal philosophy is usually the division
between the possible and the impossible.
But since every division presupposes a
concept that is to be divided, a still higher
one must be given, and this is the concept
of an object in general (taken problem-
atically, leaving undecided whether it is
something or nothing). (A290=B346)
What probably had the greatest influ-
ence on Kant in the field of metaphysics is
Baumgarten’s doctrine of transcendentals.
Baumgarten is the first prior to Kant to char-
acterize the concept of ‘transcendental’ as
‘logical’ and ‘essential’ in opposition to the
‘metaphysical’ as ‘real’.6 In fact, in the Wolffian
tradition, ‘transcendental’ was synonymous
with ‘metaphysical’, and also Kant first used
the term in this sense in the 1750s and in the

early 1760s. But from the ­mid-1760s, Kant
sharply distinguishes the ‘logical’ and ‘tran-
scendental’ from the ‘metaphysical’ and the
‘real’, following Baumgarten’s distinction, as
is evidenced by, for example, Refl 3765. In
the same note, Kant also associates ‘the tran-
scendental unity’ with the thought that ‘eve-
rything is not many [ein iedes Ding ist nicht
viel]’, which coincides with Baumgarten’s def-
inition of ‘unicum transcendentale’. Last but
not least, in his Acroasis logica, Baumgarten
used the concept of ‘transcendentalis’ to
denote the higher concepts which contained
under them other concepts, similar to the way
in which Kant defines the categories as the
higher pure concepts of the understanding in
CPR. Baumgarten was the first eighteenth-
century philosopher before Kant to use the
expression ‘transcendental concept’.
Kant is also very close to Baumgarten in
using the notion of spontaneity in the practical
field in connection with the manifold mean-
ings of freedom. According to Baumgarten,
spontaneity is the capacity of self-determi-
nation according to an inner principle of
the agent. Spontaneity differs from ‘choice’
(arbitrium), even if the latter is based on the
former, for choice is the faculty to choose
whether to follow the inner desire or not.
There are two kinds of arbitrium: (1) arbi-
trium sensitivum and (2) liberum arbitrium.
The difference between the two conceptions
of arbitrium consists in the different kinds of
desire that determine actions. In cases where
the inner desire is sensible, arbitrium is sen-
sitivum, while in cases where it is rational,
the arbitrium is liberum. Only in the latter
sense, according to Baumgarten, is it possible
to talk of libertas or libertas moralis proper.7
Kant is concerned with this problem in
many places in CPR, CPrR and in several
lecture notes. In CPR (A534=B562), Kant
writes that a will, which is affected by sensible
127
Sources and Influences
representations, is arbitrium sensitivum, which
is typical of higher animals. The human being’s
power of choice, insofar as they are rational
beings, is arbitrium liberum, namely moral
freedom or the faculty to act by means of mere
reason, for freedom from sensibility does not
necessarily imply an immediate reaction.
Also remarkable is the impact of
Baumgarten’s aesthetics on Kant. In CPR
(A21=B35–36), Kant states that the Germans
are the only people who use the word ‘aesthet-
ics’ to designate what others call the critique
of taste. Kant suggests to stop using this new
name ‘aesthetics’ in the sense of a critique of
taste, and to reserve the name ‘aesthetics’ for
the doctrine of sensible cognition, following
Baumgarten’s suggestion. In this sense, aes-
thetics would have been a part of transcen-
dental philosophy as well as of psychology.
Of course, Kant’s transcendental aesthet-
ics has nothing to do with Baumgarten, but
the aesthetics of CJ seems to share some of
his basic assumptions. First and foremost, for
both Baumgarten and Kant aesthetics has the
task to compensate for the limits of intellectual
a priori knowledge, expanding knowledge to
the cognition of the empirical and singular
facts. Second, Kant takes from Baumgarten
some key doctrines of his psychological aes-
thetics such as the distinction between an
aesthetic judgment and an intellectual judg-
ment, between the judgment of taste and the
judgment of the agreeable and the disagree-
able, between the universal in concreto and
the universal in abstracto. – MS
Further Reading
K. Ameriks, ‘The critique of metaphysics:
Kant and traditional ontology’, P. Guyer
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), pp. 249–279.
Sources and Influences
A. Nuzzo, ‘Kant and Herder on Baumgarten’s
Aesthetica’, Journal of the History of
Philosophy 44,4 (2006): 577–597.
E. Watkins (ed.), Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason. Background Source Materials
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), ch. 3.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius
In view of the fact that the young Kant found
himself strongly attracted to philology and
Latin literature,8 it is not surprising that his
later moral philosophy is strongly influenced
by Stoic ethics. In this respect, however,
Seneca seems to have been a more important
influence and source for Kant than Cicero,
whom he considered a Stoic philosopher with
regard to his moral philosophy, but more of a
Platonist (→ Plato) with regard to his specu-
lative philosophy (JL 31).
It is difficult to gauge Kant’s assessment of
Cicero exactly for a number of reasons. First,
the capacity to distinguish accurately between
Stoic doctrines original to Cicero, on the one
hand, and doctrines which formed part of a
common Stoic world view and could have
been found by Cicero in Stoic handbooks
and other sources, on the other, obviously
presupposes highly developed philological
skills. And Kant did not possess these skills.
His training in ancient philosophy and lit-
erature had rather focused on the literary
technique of the classical, i.e. Latin authors,
and on their imitation, which in spite of his
own vigorous critique of this attitude, Kant
himself never left behind. For this reason, he
actually never undertook a thorough system-
atic interpretation of any Stoic doctrine.
Secondly, it is not clear to what extent
Kant was familiar with Cicero’s writings. It is
128
known that the study of Cicero’s Letters, his
Speeches and his dialogue On Duties formed
part of Kant’s education, but an edition of
Cicero has not been found in his library.
Moreover, On Duties does not deal with
the themes of Stoic ethics which interested
Kant in particular;9 and again, it is doubt-
ful whether the Stoic doctrines it presents are
particular to Cicero or rather derive from the
Stoic philosopher Panaetius.
On the basis of his mature writings, it
becomes clear too that Kant was familiar with
Cicero’s On the Ends of Good and Evil.10
Although this work is strongly influenced by
the older Academy and the Peripatetic School,
its fifth book, albeit inconclusive in its final
position, most likely presents Cicero’s own
doctrine of virtue and of the highest good, but
whether Kant was aware of this is doubtful.
Thirdly, Kant rarely quotes or refers to
ancient authors, and when he does, he usu-
ally renders them imprecisely or erroneously.
It is certain though that Cicero exerted a
decisive influence on Kant in a crucial stage
of his philosophical development. In 1779, a
reform of the Prussian (→ Prussia) educational
system, in particular of the grammar schools,
was proclaimed by the Minister of Education
Karl Abraham von Zedlitz. Kant was of course
familiar with the agenda of this reform, which
intended to encourage the study of Plato and
Latin writers and philosophers, and in addi-
tion to this to make the relevant writings avail-
able in German translation. One of the results
of the latter objective was Christian Garve’s
translation of and commentary on Cicero’s De
officiis, published in 1783.11
Probably incited by Garve’s derogatory
review of his own CPR (→ Garve-Feder
review), Kant wrote an extensive counter-
review of Garve’s book. This review was
the basis for what eventually became Kant’s
G (1785).12 Although G does not mention

Cicero by name, it aims to provide ‘a deci-
sive alternative’ to Garve’s ethics as well as to
the ethics of Cicero as defended by Garve.13
Kant’s main objection to Cicero’s concept of
duty targets the position of Cicero and Garve
that the duties of man follow from his nature,
as nature provides man with reason, and that
therefore man ought to follow nature in order
to act morally. For both Cicero and Garve,
this nature is affected by and has an effect on
our social environment and social character.
Kant rejects this view, for the duties of man,
as citizens of the world (Weltbürger), must
be universal and cannot be measured by the
standard of our social nature. – EOO
Further Reading
U. Santoski, Die Bedeutung antiker
Theorien für die Genese und Systematik
von Kants Philosophie (Berlin/New York:
de Gruyter, 2006).
Crusius, Christian August
In the middle of the eighteenth century
Christian August Crusius (1715–1775) was
the most important opponent of Christian
→ Wolff. Rather than opposing elements in
Wolff’s system, as many others did, Crusius
established an entire system opposed to the
Wolffian one. The main elements of this system
were already present in Crusius’ philosophical dis-
sertations (published between 1739 and 1742).14
In general, Crusius was critical of the
Wolffian rationalist pretensions and instead
recognized and investigated the limitations of
human understanding. He opposed the use of
the mathematical method in philosophy, and
rejected the ontological proof for the exist-
ence of God. In all these points, Kant was
very much in the Crusian league from the
129
Sources and Influences
1760s onwards, although Kant never explic-
itly engaged with Crusius on these issues. He
did so, however, with respect to his thoughts
on the first principles of cognition.
Crusius presented a view of the supreme
principles of human cognition that differed
substantially from the standard Wolffian con-
ception. He denied that the principle of contra-
diction forms the single supreme principle, and
claimed that there are in fact three: the princi-
ple of contradiction, the principle of the insep-
arable (‘what cannot be thought without each
other cannot be without each other’) and the
principle of the uncombinable (‘what cannot
be thought with and next to each other cannot
be with and next to each other’).15 The latter
two principles, he argued, are characteristic
of human understanding, and we need them
to explain the truth of many cognitions. The
principle of contradiction on its own, there-
fore, does not suffice for human cognition.
Regarding Wolff’s principle of sufficient
ground Crusius was equally critical. Crusius
rejected its derivation from the principle of
contradiction, and argued that it is merely a
corollary of the principle of the inseparable.
Crusius’ thought was very important for
the development of Kant’s views, especially
in the pre-Critical period. In ND, Kant
inclines to a Crusian position in his attacks
on the Leibnizian-Wolffian interpretation of
especially the principle of sufficient ground.
Like Crusius, he does not consider the prin-
ciple of contradiction to be the one supreme
principle of cognition. Moreover, he repeats
Crusius’ criticism of the ambiguity of Wolff’s
term ‘sufficient ground’, preferring the term
‘determining ground’ instead  – according
to both a ground can be sufficient for many
consequences, but it can be determinate for
only one, as determinacy excludes the oppo-
site of the consequence. Finally, like Crusius,
he rejects both the derivation of the principle
Sources and Influences
of determinate ground from the principle of
contradiction and the unlimited application
of the former – for Kant God’s existence has
no determining ground, as he exists abso-
lutely necessarily.
However, Kant is critical of Crusius as
well, as he rejects his arguments that free acts
cannot have a determining ground; rather, he
argues, they have their determining ground
in the inclination of our conscious or uncon-
scious desires and volitions. This does not
deprive actions of their freedom, because the
determining grounds are not external to the
inclinations of the subject.
Later, in the Prize Essay (Inq), written in
1762, Kant still praises Crusius for noting
that human cognition not only needs for-
mal principles, but also material ones. These
material principles are a number of proposi-
tions that Crusius derived from the nature of
the understanding by means of the principles
of the inseparable and the uncombinable,
such as ‘every substance is somewhere’ and
‘everything that comes to be, comes to be by
a sufficient cause’.16
Although Kant is critical of the specific
material principles that he brings forward,
Crusius’ idea that much of our cognition
cannot be derived from the principle of con-
tradiction alone but needs further principles
was very important for the development of
Kant’s notion of synthetic a priori principles:
shortly after writing the Prize Essay, Kant
discovered the distinction between analytic
and synthetic judgments. For this reason,
some scholars, most notably L. W. Beck,17
have suggested that Kant might have cred-
ited his awakening from his dogmatic slum-
ber to Crusius just as well as to → Hume.
Kant himself acknowledges a link to Crusius
in Disc 245–246, but qualifies it by noting
that Crusius only referred to the proof of
certain metaphysical propositions without
130
offering a general treatment of the synthetic
a priori.
In a 1789 letter to Reinhold (Corr-II 41),
Kant expresses what can be considered his
main criticism of Crusius, namely that he took
a merely subjective necessity, arising from the
incapability to think things differently, for an
objective necessity. In the end, therefore, Kant
could not agree with Crusius, but this cannot
obliterate the important role Crusius played
in his philosophical development. – JZ
Further Reading
H. Allison, ‘Kant on freedom of the will’,
in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Kant and Modern
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), pp. 381–415.
E. Watkins, Kant and the Metaphysics
of Causality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
E. Watkins (ed.), Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason. Background Source Materials
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), ch. 4.
Descartes, René
Descartes’ and Kant’s philosophical projects
are both very similar and very different. René
Descartes (1596–1650) is often called the
father of modern philosophy and undoubt-
edly one aspect of their connection is the idea
that knowledge cannot be taken to simply
arise from mere beliefs, assertions or sense
impressions. Beliefs must be rationally justi-
fied for them to yield knowledge.
Descartes thought that only by pursuing
a methodical inquiry into the foundations of
truth could metaphysics be scientific in the

same way that mathematics is. The classi-
cal formulation of his manner of investigat-
ing can be found in Descartes’ Discourse on
Method (1637), where he presents four rules
always to abide by in one’s investigations, the
first of which – ‘never to accept anything as
true which I do not evidently know as being
true’ (AT VI, 18)18 – was later, at the start of
the Third Meditation of his Meditations on
First Philosophy (1641), advanced as the suc-
cinct principle ‘everything is true which I per-
ceive very clearly and distinctly’ (AT VII, 35).
The work that Descartes undertook in the
Meditations to apply the rigorous method
he introduced in the Discourse amounted to
providing a solid and universally valid foun-
dation – in the words of the Discourse, ‘the
rock or loam’ (AT VI, 29) – for the possibil-
ity of having certain knowledge of oneself as
well as the world of objects around one.
The methodical character of Descartes’
investigations in the Meditations, which pro-
gressively leads to the certainty of the cogito,
the proof of God’s existence and thence a
justification of the propositions of our com-
mon knowledge, corresponds to the way that
Kant considered CPR to be a ‘treatise on the
method’ (Bxxii) of metaphysics, and that its
‘synthetic method’ (P 263) should provide
metaphysics with a firm scientific footing.
This concerns the crucial epistemological role
of the subject in both their accounts. Kant
writes, right after the above-quoted remark
on method in the B-preface, that ‘pure specu-
lative reason [. . .] should measure its own
capacity according to the different ways for
choosing the objects of its thinking, [. . .]
because [. . .] in a priori cognition nothing
can be ascribed to the objects except what the
thinking subject takes out of itself [. . .]’, as
a result of which metaphysics, like logic, ‘has
the rare good fortune’ to be able to provide
a systematic and complete foundation ‘since
131
Sources and Influences
it has to do solely with principles’ whose use
is also determined by those same principles
(Bxxii–xxiv).
The systematicity of metaphysics is thus
intimately related to the self-reflective capac-
ity of reason itself. The striking respect
in which Descartes’ procedure is similar
to Kant’s is that a particular mode of self-
­reflection or self-knowledge functions as the
model for knowledge. For both, the reflect-
ing cogito is central to the main argument
concerning the possibility of foundational,
or, rational knowledge.19
Of course, there are major differences
between Descartes and Kant. One major
difference concerns the way in which their
very methods are de facto employed, which
informs the manner in which the cogito
functions in their respective arguments for
the foundation of possible knowledge.20 It
is clear that Descartes’ procedure is based
on a radical form of scepticism, which how-
ever is more appropriately characterized as
a method of unbending doubt.21 Descartes
exercises this doubt, not like ‘the skeptics,
who doubt purely for the sake of doubting’
(AT VI, 29), but with a view to achieving
certainty. By contrast, while some of Kant’s
arguments can plausibly be reconstructed
as modes of argumentation by reductio,22
Kant is rather unconcerned by sceptical chal-
lenges, insofar as he does not think that a
knock-down argument against the sceptic
would be the only viable and interesting
philosophical demonstration of the possibil-
ity of knowledge. It is safe to say that the
challenge of scepticism does not especially
inform the main arguments of CPR and it is
evident that the Transcendental Deduction
of the categories, arguably the centrepiece of
CPR, neither is anti-sceptical nor proceeds
by means of methodical sceptical doubt as
with Descartes.
Sources and Influences
This difference is reflected precisely in
what their argumentations have in common,
namely the central position of the cogito23 in
the deduction of knowledge. The Kantian ‘I
think’ is only a formal representation that
conveys the idea that what is called ‘a higher
unity’ provides ‘the ground of the unity of
different concepts in judgments’ (B131). In
some sense, the Kantian ‘I think’ functions
as the premise of the deductive argument,
especially in its B-edition form, which by
means of a step-by-step procedure leads to
the conclusion of the synthetic a priori, that
is, the applicability of the set of categories as
the necessary conditions of any experience.
The unity of apperception or ‘I think’ is the
vehicle of reasoning, as it were, throughout
the argumentation of the Deduction.
The order of reasoning in Kant’s
Deduction, then, appears different from that
of Descartes’ in the Meditations, as the cog-
ito there does not feature as the premise with
which Descartes’ argument starts out, but
rather only emerges as a preliminary conclu-
sion at the end of a set of arguments.
Kant does not mention Descartes a lot in
his published work.24 The most important
instance where Kant discusses Descartes is,
apart from the Refutation of Idealism in the
B-edition, in the context of rational psychol-
ogy, that is, in the first-edition Paralogisms in
CPR (A366ff.) and then again in a well-known
note in the B-edition of the Paralogisms.
At A366ff., at the start of the Fourth
Paralogism concerning the relation of the
subject to outer objects, Kant criticizes
Descartes’ dualist position regarding the
relation between consciousness and exter-
nal appearances, the knowledge of which
the problematic idealist, i.e. Descartes, only
thinks possible through causal inference and
hence vulnerable to doubt (this is argued by
Descartes in the Third Meditation). Kant
132
attacks the view that the consciousness of
oneself would be more immediate than the
perception of external objects.
Herewith, Kant appears to attack the very
method of Descartes’ radical doubt, or at least
Descartes’ procedure after having established
the cogito and the clare & distincte princi-
ple at the start of the Third Meditation. For
Descartes seems to presuppose the possibility
of having ideas of things that I judge to be
outside me, which might not in fact be ideas
that have objective reference and hence derive
in fact from things outside me. This does not
necessarily mean that Descartes doubts the glo-
bal existence of external objects (he doesn’t),
but he does seem to assume the epistemically
privileged position of the mind as having self-
knowledge as opposed to knowledge of bod-
ies (including one’s own body). He does so,
in fact, in the very position of the meditator
who, at the start of his meditation, puts every-
thing to doubt and thus achieves self-certainty
as a first piece of knowledge. But is the taking
up itself of the position of the universal, radi-
cal doubter, prior to arriving at any conclu-
sions ensuing from the doubt procedure, not
dependent on the assumption of at least one’s
own existence as part of the world?
This is related to Kant’s most detailed
discussion of Descartes’ cogito in a footnote
in the B-Paralogism at B422–423n. There,
Kant appears to endorse the claim made by
Descartes that my existence is entailed by the
proposition ‘I think’. In fact, Kant says, my
existence is already contained in the ‘I think’
and need not be inferred from it as a con-
clusion from an inference involving a major
premise. That is, according to Kant the sup-
posed inference would be: (1) Everything
which thinks exists; (2) I think; (3) therefore,
I exist. Kant holds, to the contrary, that my
existence is in fact identical with, and not
inferred from, my thinking.

But this charge against Descartes is histor-
ically not pertinent as Descartes himself does
not think that an inference is at issue, as is
clear from his replies to certain of the objec-
tions from his famous readers. Rather, the
indubitability of my existence is necessarily
involved in my thinking as something that I
do; the proposition cogito ergo sum is in fact
not an inference, based on the application of
a prior universal rule, but a performance by
a particular thinker or meditator.25
However, Kant’s main point in this foot-
note (and in the main text to which the
footnote is appended) is that Descartes, like
the other rational psychologists, seems to
ignore the fact that, as the very proposition
cogito ergo sum makes clear, a conception of
the self as an object without any empirical
‘material for thinking’ (B423n.) provided is
in fact impossible. It is thus clear that Kant
takes aim at Descartes’ quintessential idea
that in the very thought that I have of myself
as thinker I have determinate knowledge of
myself as a thing, a res cogitans, which is
absolutely distinguishable from my body or
any res extensa. It is therefore not so much
the formal structure and epistemic role of
the Cartesian cogito that Kant objects to, but
the metaphysical conclusions that apparently
Descartes draws from it.
The only other place where Descartes is
explicitly mentioned in CPR is towards the
end of Kant’s account of the ontological
proof of the existence of God (A602=B630).
Kant’s criticism of Descartes in this respect is
chiefly related to Descartes’ belief that based
on a definition of God as the most perfect
being, existence cannot be denied of God on
pain of contradiction, since necessarily exist-
ence is possessed by a most perfect being as
a being that possesses all properties, includ-
ing existence. Kant famously refutes this as
he denies that existence is a real predicate,
133
Sources and Influences
although Kant’s criticism in CPR is actually
directed at arguments attempting to prove
a highest being, rather than a most perfect
being (cf. by contrast OPD 156). At any rate,
according to Kant, one can perfectly conceive
of God without thereby analytically implying
his existence.
However, Descartes makes an important
distinction between various applications of
the concepts of existence and essence (AT
VII, 68) that Kant does not appear to have
noticed (but cf. A596=B624); in the case of
God, existence and essence are indeed mutu-
ally implicative but in all other cases exist-
ence and essence do not coincide; therefore,
according to Descartes not all things of which
I have an idea thereby necessarily exist. – DS
Further Reading
J.-M. Beyssade, ‘Descartes’ “I am a thing
that thinks” versus Kant’s “I think”’, in
D. Garber, B. Longuenesse (eds), Kant and
the Early Moderns (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2008), pp. 32–40.
M. Fichant, J.-L. Marion (eds), Descartes en
Kant (Paris: PUF, 2006).
B. Longuenesse, ‘Kant’s “I think” versus
Descartes’ “I am a thing that thinks”’, in
D. Garber, B. Longuenesse (eds), Kant and
the Early Moderns (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2008), pp. 9–31.
Epicurus and Epicureanism
The picture which eighteenth-century
Germany formed of Epicureanism was not
based on a direct study of the ancient sources,
including texts of Epicurus, but appears
rather to be influenced by the presence
of Epicureanism in contemporary French
Sources and Influences
philosophy and English → empiricism. On
this narrow basis, Kant valued Epicureanism
above all because of its philosophy of nature,
whose main tenets consist in the doctrine of
atomism and the assumption of an empty
space or vacuum. According to Kant, the
Epicureans ‘were the best natural philoso-
phers among all the thinkers of Greece’
(JL 30). This judgment can be explained by
Kant’s approval of the exclusively mecha-
nistic constitution of nature that Epicurus
defended. Kant praises Epicurus for his rig-
orous or ‘pure empiricism’ (A466=B494). In
particular, Kant praises Epicurus for having
proceeded ‘more consistently in accord with
his sensual system (for in his inferences he
never exceeded the bounds of experience)
than Aristotle and Locke’ (A854=B882).
On the other hand, though, Kant feels com-
pelled to criticize the doctrine of Epicurean
philosophy of nature that introduces the idea
of an ‘accidental generation’. Throughout his
works, he criticizes the induction of a theory
of well-structured and well-organized nature
obeying mechanical or teleological laws of
nature from the accidental nature of things
as ‘absurd [ungereimt]’ (CJ 391) or even, in
particular in his earlier works, as ‘impertinent
[unverschämt]’ (NH 227). In CJ, Kant argues
extensively against any form of generatio
aequivoca, i.e. ‘the generation of an organ-
ized being through the mechanism of crude,
unorganized matter’ (CJ 419n.). According
to Kant, this Epicurean model of explanation
ignores ‘the difference between a technique
of nature and mere mechanism’ resulting
in ‘blind chance [being] assumed to be the
explanation’ of the agreement of nature with
‘our concepts of ends’ (CJ 393).
As to his practical philosophy, Kant
defends Epicurus against the charge of
upholding a mere hedonism. On several
occasions, Kant calls Epicurus a man with a
134
high moral sense and draws attention to the
fact that the principle of his moral theory is
not intended to determine moral action, but
rather to explain it (CPrR 116). Epicurus is a
‘virtuous’ man with an ‘ever-cheerful heart’,
according to one qualification of Epicurus’
moral attitude that Kant repeats more than
once (here CPrR 116 and MM 485). Kant,
however, has problems with the Epicurean
connection of virtue with happiness, for the
notion of virtue seems to be implied in the
Epicureans’ promotion of the individual’s
happiness. Epicurean happiness consists in
the enjoyment of a highest pleasure regard-
less of any moral consideration; the maxi-
mum of happiness a fortiori consists in the
satisfaction of a maximum of needs. The one
who is happy has thus succeeded in achiev-
ing the highest good. The principle of happi-
ness pivotal to Epicurean ethics is therefore
in Kant’s eyes completely mistaken (CPrR
126) as striving for happiness does not bring
about ‘a ground for a virtuous disposition
(Gesinnung)’ (CPrR 114).26
But even though the Epicurean moral
principle is erroneous in view of grounding a
moral theory, it is true in view of morality in
general and in agreement with certain tenets
of anthropology. Kant describes the principle
of Epicurean morality repeatedly as ‘self-love’
(Selbstliebe), which he also finds in Helvétius
and Mandeville.27 Self-love, however, is not
to be mistaken for ‘selfish love’ (Eigenliebe),
which excludes others, as Epicurean self-love
is the ground for the love of others and thus
increases our pleasure.28 According to the
table of the ‘Practical Material Determining
Grounds in the principle of morality’ in
CPrR, the determining factor of the will in
Epicurean ethics is what Kant calls a ‘physical
feeling’, i.e. it is ‘subjective’ and thus empiri-
cal and not capable of providing a universal
moral principle (CPrR 40). – EOO

Euler, Leonhard
Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) was a Swiss
mathematician of great repute who pro-
foundly influenced his discipline’s develop-
ment.29 Euler made contributions to standard
areas of mathematics like number theory,
algebra, analysis and geometry. But he also
explored new areas such as graph theory30
and differential geometry. And his work in
mechanics, optics and acoustics established
him also as a foremost applied mathemati-
cian. Altogether, this amounts to making
Euler the most prolific mathematician of all
time, with over 800 papers to his name.
However, it is worth noting that Euler’s
education was wide-ranging, and he obtained
a master’s degree in philosophy before focus-
ing his energies on the full-time study of
mathematics.31 Euler also gets involved in
important philosophical discussions in the
eighteenth century, chiefly to defend science
or the Holy Scriptures against philosophi-
cal attacks.32 He thus criticizes the prevalent
Wolffian (→ Wolff) system of monadology,33
in particular because the notion that divi-
sion of matter can be completed with some
elementary monads is inconsistent with the
infinite divisibility of matter, an issue which
Kant discusses in the Second Antinomy.
This issue is one facet of what Speiser
describes as the ‘Euler-Kantian question’,34
namely that of the impact of physics on
metaphysics. The rationalist tradition
which dominated the philosophical scene in
the mid-eighteenth century in Germany had
it that philosophy must start from secure
first principles. Its progress, for Wolff, is
then governed by the principles of deduc-
tion, in the manner of a geometric proof.
Once this logical chain reached concrete
principles, these would be confronted with
experience. Such confrontation could lead
135
Sources and Influences
to the need to revise the results of mechan-
ics or geometry.
→ Newton’s method was to start rather
from the phenomena and ascend from these
to first principles, using mathematics.35 In
1748, in his essay Reflections on Space and
Time,36 Euler defends this conception, and
this clearly influenced Kant, who endorses
this view at NM 167–168.37
Another area in which Euler’s dissatisfac-
tion with the prevalent Wolffian metaphys-
ics influenced Kant’s thinking, is the issue
of the nature of space. Up to 1768, Kant’s
writings essentially defend a relational view
of the nature of space, namely the view that
space is constituted out of relations between
physical objects.38 In 1768, however, in an
essay on incongruent counterparts (DS 37),
Kant appears to acknowledge Euler’s 1748
essay on space and time,39 in which he argues
for absolute space on the basis of Newton’s
laws of motion. Euler contends that the rela-
tional theory of space cannot account for
the motion in a straight line of a body under
inertia because such a fixed direction cannot
be explained in terms of all the other moving
bodies of the universe.40 Euler here mistak-
enly assumes the relational theory to refer
to relations of actual bodies,41 but his reflec-
tions were to feed into Kant’s arguments for
absolute space.
Kant, however, does not fully endorse the
Newtonian conception of absolute space
adopted by Euler (NM 378). Kant’s posi-
tion on this issue becomes clearer in ID 398,
where he first introduces the idea that space
has independent reality as a form of sensible
intuition. This move represents the first step
towards the full-blown transcendental ideal-
ist view of Kant’s Critical philosophy.
This transformation of Kant’s thought
goes well beyond Euler, but the latter’s epis-
temological views on the idea of space can
Sources and Influences
be seen as pointing in a Kantian direction.
Euler argues that one can only have ideas
such as that of space through reflection.
His disagreement with Wolff on this issue
is echoed by Kant describing the Leibnizian
(→ Leibniz) conception of space as resulting
from a ‘deception of transcendental reflec-
tion’ (A275=B331). Moreover, Euler also
understands the privileged role of space and
time as conditions of experience, but, unlike
Kant, he does not conclude to their transcen-
dental ideality.42
Finally, an important influence of Euler
upon Kant’s late views should be noted. This
is found in his theory of aether. In OP, Kant
explains the role of heat in phase changes
between the solid, liquid and gaseous states
of matter in terms of the penetration of mat-
ter by a ‘universally distributed, continuous,
space-filling, perpetually vibrating’43 fluid
which he refers to as the caloric (Wärmestoff).
This, Kant identifies with Euler’s light-aether
(pulsus Aetheris) (OP-I 523). Insofar as
this caloric is viewed by Kant as providing
‘a material principle of the unity of pos-
sible experience’ (OP-I 585), it illustrates
how, even at this late stage, Euler’s influence
stretches to the heart of Kant’s philosophical
enterprise. – CO
Further Reading
E. Watkins (ed.), Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason. Background Source Materials
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), ch. 5.
Herz, Marcus
Marcus Herz (1747–1803) was born in Berlin
as the son of a Sofer or Jewish scribe. In 1762,
he was sent to → Königsberg in order to
136
train for a mercantile career. In 1766, how-
ever, he enrolled in the medical faculty of the
University of Königsberg, the only faculty
allowing Jewish students. Soon he realized
that for him medicine was not meant to be
more than a source of income, as his heart lay
with philosophy. In Königsberg, he attended
the lectures of Kant, with whom he soon devel-
oped a close friendship. This is borne out by
the fact that Kant appointed Herz to respond
to his inaugural dissertation (ID), thus oppos-
ing the will of the philosophy department.
Shortly afterwards, Herz had to abandon
his studies in Königsberg due to financial rea-
sons. Accompanied by a letter of recommen-
dation by Kant for Moses → Mendelssohn,
Herz returned to Berlin. Mendelssohn
received him very warmly and soon after-
wards they became close friends. The influ-
ence of Mendelssohn on Herz’s philosophical
development was probably as important as
that of Kant and prompted him to harmonize
both their philosophical systems.44 In 1774,
Herz received the degree of doctor in medi-
cine from the University of Halle. In 1786 (or
1787), he was awarded the title ‘Professor’ by
the Prussian (→ Prussia) king, an exceptional
distinction in view of the fact that Herz was
Jewish. Apart from widely acknowledged
treatises on medical issues,45 he authored sev-
eral influential philosophical essays.
His early Betrachtungen aus der spekula-
tiven Weltweisheit (Königsberg, 1771) dis-
cussed Kant’s ID and had a huge impact on
the reception of ID and of Kant’s early phi-
losophy in general.46 This book has the form
of a series of letters of a friend of the Kantian
philosophy, and is obviously extremely well
informed about the development of Kant’s
philosophy in the second half of the 1760s. It
is of great historical value because here Herz
elaborates on issues and debates which had
remained implicit in ID itself. Herz shows

that he is thoroughly familiar with Kant’s
lectures, to which many passages make refer-
ence more or less directly. Betrachtungen also
gives an indication of the growing influence
of Mendelssohn on Herz, to whom in par-
ticular the proof for the existence of the soul
and Herz’s critical remarks on Kant’s elabo-
rations on the principle of contradiction are
indebted. In spite of his high expectations of
Herz’s book, Kant was in the end not entirely
pleased with it and repudiated its portrayal
of his own ID as being ‘not very fortunate in
expressing its meaning’.47 Undoubtedly, this
criticism was also informed by Kant’s grow-
ing critical distance towards his own ID.
Herz’s second philosophical essay Versuch
über den Geschmack und die Ursachen seiner
Verschiedenheit (Mitau-Leipzig, 1776) deals
with aesthetics, more in particular with the
German Sturm und Drang poetry that is eval-
uated from the perspective of a psychology of
the faculty of aesthetic judgments. From this
perspective, Sturm und Drang is to be valued
as a creative accomplishment but not as art,
for art ‘requires a proportionate use of more
powers, precise knowledge of the world and
of the human soul’.48 Kant received the second
edition (1790) of this essay and regretted not
having received it before completing the man-
uscript of CJ, for otherwise he would certainly
have made use of some of Herz’s insights.49
Apart from some interruptions, Kant and
Herz maintained a correspondence which
lasted into the 1790s. Most important from
a philosophical point of view however are the
letters from the 1770s, which offer essential
insights into the conceptual genesis of CPR.50
Yet, although, starting in the late 1770s,
Herz held private lectures in Berlin on Kant’s
logic, psychology and anthropology – before
a notable audience among whom there were
the Prussian Minister of Culture Von Zedlitz,
the later Friedrich Wilhelm III, the Humboldt
137
Sources and Influences
brothers, Schiller, Goethe, Schleiermacher,
Friedrich Schlegel and others – he gradually
came to realize he did not fully comprehend
the implications of Kant’s Critical writings,
which, in a letter to Kant (Corr-II 14ff.), he
effectively acknowledged upon receiving his
copy of Kant’s CPrR.
Also historically relevant is the fact that
Herz brought Kant into contact with Salomon
Maimon,51 whose manuscript of the Versuch
über die Transscendentalphilosophie (1790)
he sent to Kant. – EOO
Hume, David
David Hume (1711–1776) was a Scottish phi-
losopher who proceeded to investigate human
nature by means of experience and observa-
tion rather than by means of a priori reason-
ing. According to Hume, the perceptions of the
mind consist in impressions and ideas. Hume
distinguished between these not in terms of
their content, but in terms of their force and
vivacity. Impressions are ‘all our more lively
perceptions, when we hear, or see, or feel, or
love, or hate, or desire, or will’52 while ideas
are ‘the faint images of [impressions] in think-
ing and reasoning’.53 Hume went on to formu-
late the thesis that ‘all our ideas or more feeble
perceptions are copies of our impressions or
more lively ones’ (EHU 2.5).
Hume’s copy thesis became a powerful
tool in his investigation of the main concepts
of metaphysics – concepts such as existence,
substance, the self and causation.
In the case of the idea of the self, Hume
used his copy thesis to argue against the
Cartesian (→ Descartes) idea of the self
as being a simple continuous substance.
He argued that there is no impression that
continues ‘invariably the same, thro’ the
Sources and Influences
whole course of our lives’ that could serve
as the basis of the Cartesian idea of the self
(T 1.4.6.2). Each of us is literally ‘nothing
but a bundle or collection of different per-
ceptions, which succeed each other with an
inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual
flux and movement’ (T 1.4.6.4). In turn,
Hume argued, the identity we ascribe to this
bundle of perceptions is a fiction produced
by the imagination (T 1.4.6.15).
In tracing the idea of causation to its origin,
Hume began by arguing that it must be derived
from some relation among objects (rather than
from some quality of objects). The three rela-
tions involved are contiguity, priority, and nec-
essary connection. Necessary connection is the
most important of these relations, and Hume
traced the idea of necessary connection not to
the objects or events themselves, but to a feeling
that arises in the mind only through repeated
experience. Hume argued that no impression
of necessary connection can be found when we
experience a single instance in which two objects
are supposed to have a necessary connection
(T  1.3.14, EHU 7.1). After repeatedly experi-
encing objects of the same sort being conjoined
in the same way, however, ‘the mind is carried
by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to
expect its usual attendant, and to believe that
it will exist’ (EHU 7.2.3). It is ‘this customary
transition of the imagination from one object
to its usual attendant [that] is the sentiment or
impression, from which we form the idea of
power or necessary connexion’ (EHU 7.2.3).
Hume further utilized his division of the
perceptions of the mind into impressions and
ideas to argue against the position that the
foundation of our moral distinctions (good,
evil, right, wrong, etc.) ‘is nothing but a con-
formity to reason’ (T 3.1.1.4). Hume argued
that although through reason we discover
truths about objects or ideas, reason by itself
does not have an effect on either our passions
138
or our will (T 2.2.2 & 3.1.1). Moral distinc-
tions, however, do have an effect on our
passions and will  – that is, ‘[m]orals excite
passions, and produce or prevent actions’
(T 3.1.1.6), so they must be grounded in some-
thing more than just reason. That something
more is feeling or sentiment. In An Enquiry
Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751),
Hume wrote: ‘This sentiment can be no other
than a feeling for the happiness of mankind,
and a resentment of their misery.’54
In Hume’s epistemology, sentiment or feel-
ing continued to play a central role. According
to Hume, belief does not involve a difference
in the content of an idea, but ‘belief con-
sists merely in a certain feeling or sentiment’
(T  App 2). ‘An idea assented to feels differ-
ent from a fictitious idea’ (T 1.3.7.7). Ideas
believed have ‘an additional force and vivac-
ity’ (T 1.3.7.5) that has been transferred from
impressions to ideas by means of custom. As
a result, ‘belief is more properly an act of the
sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our
natures’ (T 1.4.1.8). Hume extended this con-
clusion beyond belief to probable reasonings.
Hume claimed that ‘all probable reasoning
is nothing but a species of sensation. ‘Tis not
solely in poetry and music, we must follow
our taste and sentiment, but likewise in phi-
losophy’ (T 1.3.8.12). In the Treatise, but not
in the Enquiry, Hume even extended this to
geometry, because, unlike arithmetic and alge-
bra, geometry’s ‘first principles are still drawn
from the general appearance of the objects’ (T
1.3.1.4 see also T 1.2.417ff.). Hume did, how-
ever, distinguish knowledge from probability,
but he also famously argued that ‘all knowl-
edge degenerates into probability’ (T 1.4.1.1).
Hume did not, however, repeat this argument
in the Enquiry, where he drew the distinc-
tion between Relations of Ideas and Matters
of Fact. There Hume wrote that relations of
ideas, which include arithmetic, algebra and

geometry, ‘are discoverable by the mere opera-
tion of thought’ (EHU 4.1.1).
Kant famously wrote that ‘the remembrance
of David Hume was the very thing that many
years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slum-
ber and gave a completely different direction
to my researches in the field of speculative
philosophy’ (P 260). Although Kant’s critique
of Hume’s position on causation gets the most
attention, Kant also clearly responded to Hume’s
positions in other areas of metaphysics as well
as epistemology, moral theory and aesthetics.
German translations of Hume’s two Enquiries
became available in 1755. Although a trans-
lation of the conclusion to Book I of Hume’s
Treatise was published in the Königsberger
Zeitung in 1771, a full translation of the
Treatise wasn’t published until 1790. Hume’s
views would also have been available to Kant
at least through a 1772 translation of Beattie’s
Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth
(1770) and Johann → Tetens’ Philosophische
Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre
Entwickelung (1777). – SB
Further Reading
H. Allison, Custom and Reason in Hume:
A Kantian Reading of the First Book of
the Treatise (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008).
S. M. Bayne, Kant on Causation: On the
Fivefold Routes to the Principle of
Causation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004).
P. Guyer, Knowledge, Reason and Taste:
Kant’s Response to Hume (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2008).
P. Kitcher, Kant’s Transcendental Psychology
(New York: Oxford University Press,
1990), esp. ch. 4.
M. Kuehn, ‘Kant’s conception of ‘Hume’s
problem’, Journal of the History of
Philosophy 21 (1983): 175–193.
139
Sources and Influences
Leibniz, Gottlob Wilhelm
Leibniz (1646–1716) never published a trea-
tise in which he systematically revealed all
the details of his philosophical positions,
and perhaps more importantly, many of his
important writings were not published until
after the eighteenth century. From the texts
that would have been available to Kant,
however, it is clear that Leibniz believed that
reality is composed of simple substances that
are unities.55 This led to his rejection of the
Cartesian (→ Descartes) notion of material
substance, because Leibniz ‘perceived that it
is impossible to find the principles of a true
unity in matter alone, or in what is only
passive’.56
As a result, Leibniz held that we must think
of these simple substances ‘on the model of
the notion we have of souls’.57 These simple
substances (or monads) therefore are capable
of action and have perception and appetite.58
It is only in terms of these internal character-
istics that one monad is different from any
other – Leibniz held that ‘there are never two
beings in nature that are perfectly alike, two
beings in which it is not possible to discover
an internal difference’.59
Whereas monads are simple unities, bod-
ies are composites or aggregates – composed
of, or grounded in, an infinity of monads.60
As ‘entities of aggregation’ the unity bodies
have ‘is a mental one, and consequently their
very being is also in a way mental, or phe-
nomenal, like that of the rainbow’.61
Additionally, Leibniz held that given the
Cartesian notion of a substance as ‘a thing
which exists in such a way as to depend on
no other thing for its existence’62 then there
is no way to consistently explain ‘how one
substance can communicate with another
created substance’.63 Leibniz rejected the
Spinozistic (→ Spinoza) single substance
Sources and Influences
solution because it would ultimately entail
that there is no human freedom,64 and he
rejected Malebranche’s occasionalist solu-
tion because rather than providing an expla-
nation, it simply amounts to an appeal to
miracles.65 Instead, Leibniz developed his
view of pre-established harmony  – holding
that ‘God originally created the soul (and
any other real unity) in such a way that
everything must arise for it from its own
depths [fonds], through a perfect spontane-
ity relative to itself, and yet with a perfect
conformity relative to external things’.66 As
a result, God ‘brings it about that each sim-
ple substance has relations that express all
the others, and consequently, that each sim-
ple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of
the universe’.67
Although each simple substance ‘repre-
sents the universe from its own point of
view’68, finite substances do so only confus-
edly.69 All substances have an infinity of per-
ceptions, but for finite substances, ‘at every
moment there is in us an infinity of per-
ceptions, unaccompanied by awareness or
reflection’.70 Nevertheless, just as the noise
of an individual wave contributes to the roar
of the sea, each of these minute perceptions
‘makes itself known only when combined
confusedly with all the others’.71
According to Leibniz, however, some
substances perceive things more or less dis-
tinctly than others. The perceptions of bare
monads are not ‘sufficiently distinct to be
remembered’.72 Souls (e.g. animals) have sen-
sations – that is, they are substances ‘where
perception is more distinct and accompanied
by memory’.73 Finally, minds have reason,
which enables them to have knowledge of
necessary truths and to be capable of self-
reflection.74 Leibniz goes on to say that the
reasonings of finite minds ‘are based on two
great principles, that of contradiction [. . .]
140
[a]nd that of sufficient reason’.75 These in
turn, Leibniz used to ground the distinction
between necessary and contingent truths  –
that is, truths of reason and truths of fact.76
In his correspondence with Clarke, Leibniz
also used the principle of sufficient reason
to argue for his principle of the identity of
indiscernibles,77 and in turn used the princi-
ple of sufficient reason and the principle of
the identity of indiscernibles to argue against
the Newtonian theory of absolute space and
in favour of a relational theory of space.78
Although Kant did famously write that ‘the
Critique of Pure Reason might well be the
true apology for Leibniz’ (Disc 250), in the
Critical period Kant consistently criticized
the main Leibnizian positions mentioned
above. According to Kant, Leibniz’s mona-
dology, pre-established harmony, principle
of sufficient reason, principle of the identity
of indiscernibles, and his relational theory of
space all revealed errors that could be attrib-
uted to a single root cause, namely, Leibniz’s
failure to recognize that understanding and
sensibility are entirely distinct sources of
cognitive content, both of which are essential
for cognition.79 As a result of this root error,
‘Leibniz constructed an intellectual system
of the world’ (A270=B326) in which he
‘compared all things with each other solely
through concepts’ (A270=B326), and intui-
tion was ‘intellectualized, i.e.  transformed
into mere confused concepts’ (PE 282). – SB
Further Reading
A. Jauernig, ‘Kant, the Leibnizians, and
Leibniz’, in B. Look (ed.), The Continuum
Companion to Leibniz (London/New
York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 289–309.
J. Mittelstraß, Leibniz und Kant.
Erkenntnistheoretische Studien (Berlin/
New York: de Gruyter, 2011).

Locke, John
John Locke’s influence on Kant is consid-
erable, if not wholly direct. It is probable
that most of Kant’s knowledge of Locke
was derived from → Leibniz’s New Essays
or from → Tetens’ work. Many of Kant’s
endeavours during the Critical period can
be seen as being opposed to what he saw as
a pervasive kind of ‘transcendental realism’
in philosophy, which, very briefly, is the
metaphysical and epistemological position
which claims that knowledge of objects
in space can only be gained through some
kind of direct contact of the mind with the
things in themselves. In effect, transcenden-
tal realism is the position that tries to estab-
lish that knowledge of things in themselves
is possible for finite human beings. Kant
was keen to distance himself from all vari-
eties of transcendental realism, and there
is no doubt that he thought that Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
was a special case of the latter kind of
philosophy.
Evidence of Kant’s mistrust of Locke’s phi-
losophy can be gained by what he says in CPR
concerning Locke’s attempt to sensualize all
concepts of the understanding (A271=B327),
and when he refers to Locke as one who ‘fol-
lowed [Aristotle]’ (A854=B882), thus linking
Locke with the empiricist tradition. Kant
has further reservations about Locke due to
the fact that the latter seeks to derive pure
concepts from experience alone. Not being
content with this alone, Locke (according to
Kant) goes even further, attempting to prove
the existence of God and the immortality of
the soul with an unerring mathematical pre-
cision (A854–855=B882–883).
Locke’s denial of innate principles and
innate ideas is interesting when contrasted
with Kant’s treatment of the same topic.
141
Sources and Influences
Kant’s attitude towards innate ideas is com-
plicated due to the fact that he rejects the
claim of the rationalists, which is that cer-
tain kinds of clear and distinct ideas are
bequeathed to us prior to experience. Kant
seems to endorse a quasi-empiricist position
at the start of CPR when he claims that ‘all
our cognition begins with experience’ (B1).
This Lockean sounding claim must be read
in conjunction with what Kant goes on to
say further on in the same passage, where
he adds the proviso that not all knowledge
actually arises through experience. What is
clear from this, contrary to Locke’s doctrine
that all ideas can be traced back to a sensory
source, is that Kant contends that the pure
concepts of experience, as well as the pure
forms of intuition, cannot be abstracted from
any sensory source at all.
Locke’s theory of space and time tends to
receive little attention generally due to the
immense importance of Kant’s subsequent
thinking on this subject. Locke thought that
space was a simple idea given to us directly
through experience of various kinds of dis-
tances, which are suggested to the mind. Such
distances are perceived either between objects
or within the internal space of the objects
themselves. Our idea of time is more compli-
cated, due to the fact that Locke defined time
as a simple mode of our idea of duration.
Various distances can be observed by reflect-
ing on our internal sequence of ideas, which
Locke calls succession. It is these various
internal distances observed by the mind that
Locke calls time. Kant keeps to Locke’s basic
distinction of viewing space as an external
sense, whereas time is an inner sense.
Kant’s major difficulty with Locke’s the-
ory of space and time really lies in the fact
that, for the latter, these ideas are thought
to be abstracted from experience. For Kant,
space and time are the forms of our having
Sources and Influences
an experience of objects at all. As forms of a
priori intuition, they precede and make pos-
sible our knowledge of objects.
Another key area of interest for Kant, as
far as Locke’s philosophy is concerned, is the
way in which we are led to an understand-
ing of substance. Locke viewed our idea of
substances of natural kinds of things as com-
plex ideas compounded out of various sim-
ple ideas. Particular substances, for Locke,
are products of the mind’s acts of combining
ideas into sorts of things; the ‘species idea’ is
nothing but the abstracted idea of a combi-
nation of ideas which nominally agree with
those qualities in things appearing in the
world over time.
Kant’s method diverges drastically from
Locke’s abstractive method, which becomes
clear when we see that Kant instates the
pure concept of ‘inherence and subsistence’
or ‘substance’ as well as the accompanying
categorical form of judgment into the human
understanding. Although the pure concept
of substance is not an innate idea, accord-
ing to Kant, it nevertheless can be classed
as a kind of non-representational ground of
our experience of things which appear in the
world. So, whereas our idea of substance for
Locke is and can only be a nominal kind, for
Kant it acts as a pure concept that conditions
our knowledge of appearances of the form
of substance and accident, such that our
appearances will conform to the conceptual
structure of our understanding.
Kant cites Locke in CPR a number of
times. Perhaps the most important section
where Locke appears is the aforementioned
note to the section Amphiboly of Concepts
of Reflection (A260–A292=B316–B349).
Kant refers to Locke’s → empiricism as
‘noogony’, which, as a form of ‘sensualism’, is
contrasted with Leibniz’s intellectually moti-
vated epistemology. Kant makes the pointed
142
remark that both Locke and Leibniz failed to
separate the understanding from sensibility,
which led Locke to seek knowledge of things
in the sensibility alone, while Leibniz was led
to seek knowledge of things in the intellect
alone. – NH
Meier, Georg Friedrich
Georg Friedrich Meier was born in
Ammendorf near Halle on 29 March 1718.
During his youth, he was educated in a
Pietist (→ Pietism) milieu and in 1730 he
enrolled at the University of Halle, even
though he only began his studies in 1735,
finishing them in 1739. He started teaching
at Halle in the Fall semester of 1739/40 as
a Privatdozent, from 1746 to 1748 as an
Extraordinary Professor and from 1748 to
1777 as Full Professor.
In 1754, he was ordered by Frederick
William II (→ Frederick the Great) to teach
John → Locke’s Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, which Meier promptly
did as is evidenced by his Collegium über
Locks Versuch vom menschlichen Verstande.
However, Meier spent all of his life comment-
ing and writing companions on Christian →
Wolff and Alexander Gottlieb → Baumgarten.
Meier died on 21 June 1777.80
Kant was heavily influenced by Meier.
He read his logic lectures for about forty
years based on Meier’s Vernunftlehre (1752)
and his brief Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre
(1752). Kant’s own Reflexionen (Refl) and
lectures on logic (LL) as well as CPR show
a number of elements taken from Meier’s
handbooks. This is evident already from the
terminology used by Kant: Kantian terms
such as ‘egoism’, ‘genius’, ‘horizon’, ‘system’,

‘party’, ‘popular’, ‘pure’, ‘doctrine of reason’,
and ‘prejudice’ all come from Meier.81
In particular, Meier was important for
Kant because he mediated Locke’s philoso-
phy, helping to introduce Lockean issues
such as the ‘extent of human knowledge’ and
the ‘degrees of assent’ into Kant’s philosophi-
cal framework.
Meier’s influence on Kant can also be
found in the conception of ‘system’ and
‘architectonic’ in CPR. Kant states that the
‘architectonic’ is the art of constructing a
system. Kant specifies that only a systematic
unity turns common knowledge into a sci-
ence, that is, transforms a simple aggregate
into a system. This systematic unity ensures
that knowledge is not fragmentary, which is
a crucial Kantian issue in conceiving of the
possibility of a complete a priori knowledge.
System is defined as the unity of various cog-
nitions under one idea. The idea is the concep-
tion of the form of the whole, since because
of it the extent of the manifold cognitions as
well as the position of the parts among them
can be determined (A832=B860). The idea
is therefore fundamental in determining the
end and the form of the whole. The form of
the whole is ‘therefore articulated (articula-
tio) and not heaped together (coacervatio)’
(A833=B861).
Kant goes on to state that if we abstract
from any content of knowledge, considered
objectively, then all knowledge considered
subjectively is either historical or rational
(A836=B864). Historical knowledge is cog-
nitio ex datis, while rational knowledge is
cognitio ex principiis. It is historical when
knowledge is not systematized according to
principles. It is rational when it proceeds
from principles and investigates a priori
every possible knowledge. Kant takes these
notions from the lectures on Meier’s com-
panion of logic. In §104 of Auszug aus der
143
Sources and Influences
Vernunftlehre, Meier writes that a doctrinal
edifice (Lehrgebäude, systema) is a set of
dogmatic truths, which are related to each
other and which taken together form scien-
tific knowledge as a whole. Meier adds that
the truth of a doctrinal edifice requires that
all its parts are related in such a way that
each of them is a ground or a consequence
of the others.82
In relation to the above-mentioned section
of Meier’s handbook, Kant is quoted as say-
ing (LL 100) that a system is a multitude or
manifold of various simple cognitions and
truths combined together, such that taken
together these constitute a whole, and that
this system is either historical or rational.
Kant comments on the same passage early
in the 1770s in his lectures on logic (see LL
399–400). Unlike in the Logic Blomberg, in
the Logic Philippi Kant raises the problem of
an a priori ordering idea or principle and the
necessity of a plan to set up the system,83 and
he does so by elaborating on his ideas about
Meier’s doctrines.
Meier is also Kant’s source of the theory
of logical prejudices, which are those preju-
dices that find their origin in the general
configuration of human thought and speech.
It was Meier who set the stage for Kant’s
idea of ‘egoism’ in the variants of ‘logical’,
‘­aesthetic’, and ‘moral’ egoism. Kant was
concerned about the consequences that
‘private judgments’ have with regard to the
transcendental conditions of human cogni-
tion. Like Meier, Kant stresses the need to
respect ‘logical pluralism’ and the necessity
of a ‘­universal human reason’ as a common
ground of each individual human being.
As a result of his examination of the dis-
tortions produced by prejudices, Meier took
great interest in the formative process of
knowledge. In his Beyträge zu der Lehre von
den Vorurtheilen (1766), he problematized
Sources and Influences
the subject–object relation by emphasizing
the inevitable consequences of prejudices
in knowledge. Meier supports the idea that
the prejudice of experiential cognition is the
foundation of all other cognition according
to which all sensations represent to the mind
the configuration and quantity of an inter-
nal determination of the objects of the sen-
sations. In this way, Meier distinguishes the
world of sense experience from the world of
the objects themselves, laying the foundation
for the Kantian distinction between the phe-
nomenal and noumenal world.84 – MS
Newton, Isaac
Kant’s reception of and engagement with
Newtonian physics spans across his entire
academic career, from the pre-Critical writ-
ings to OP, and can be clustered around
three main (albeit not exhaustive) themes:
(1) dynamical theory of matter; (2) absolute
space; (3) mechanics.
The first signs of Kant’s reception of
Newtonian physics are in the short 1754 essay
EAR, where universal gravitation is presented
as the driving power of nature. A year later,
in NH Kant laid down a cosmogony ‘accord-
ing to the principles of Newton’. Although
no reference in NH is made to Newton’s laws
of motion, Kant explained the formation of
celestial bodies out of primordial corpus-
cular matter, among which attraction and
repulsion would act. But, as Kant declared,
while attraction had been demonstrated by
Newton, repulsion was assumed only on the
basis of what he called unquestionable evi-
dence coming from the dissolution of mat-
ter in vapours. Kant’s early dynamical theory
of matter betrays, then, the double nature
of his debt to Newtonianism. By identifying
144
repulsion as a force at work primarily in fer-
mentations and vapours, Kant was implicitly
endorsing Newton’s dynamical corpuscular-
ism as displayed in the Opticks.85 Moreover,
the ether of the Queries of the Opticks, as the
matter of light, appears again in F, also from
1755, with the double connotation of being
the matter of light and of fire.
As far as space and mechanics are con-
cerned, in the early essay MR (1758) Kant
endorsed a form of relationism, following
the tradition of → Leibniz and → Wolff
(whom he nonetheless criticized on the laws
of impact and collision).86 Without mention-
ing Newton explicitly, Kant rejected the idea
of absolute space as an empty container of
bodies, and defined true motion as motion
always relative to other bodies. He also
introduced a principle of action and reaction
that was meant to correct the corresponding
Leibnizian-Wolffian principle, and was sig-
nificantly different from Newton’s one since
impressed forces were absent from Kant’s
theory of motion.
In DS, from 1768, Kant articulated his
disagreement with relationalism by means
of the argument of incongruent counter-
parts: space cannot be defined in terms of
external relations among parts of matter,
because otherwise it would not be possible
to distinguish between left hand and right
hand, or any other incongruent counterparts.
Kant grounded that difference in an ‘absolute
and original space’ (DS 383), which though
was not intended as a Newtonian substance,
but as a ‘fundamental concept which first of
all makes possible all such outer sensation’
(DS 383), anticipating in this way somehow
the role that space plays in the Critical period
as a pure form of sensibility.
Kant’s engagement with the three afore-
mentioned Newtonian themes becomes the
object of mature reflection in the Critical

period, especially in MFNS. There is consid-
erable and ongoing debate among scholars as
to whether this text should be read as Kant’s
philosophical justification of Newton’s
mechanics as spelled out in the Principia.87
There are in fact some important com-
mon elements but also differences between
Newton and Kant such as the following:
(1) Kant’s mature theory of matter clearly
betrays its Newtonian origins by identi-
fying attraction as an action at a distance
through empty space (MFNS 512). Yet
the balancing argument through which
attraction and repulsion are introduced
can be regarded as pre-Newtonian:88
from a Newtonian point of view, spin-
ning around its own axis would suffice to
prevent matter from collapsing into one
point due to attraction, without the need
of introducing a counterbalancing repul-
sive force.
(2) In the chapter on Phenomenology, by
rejecting absolute motion Kant differ-
entiated himself from Newton’s notion
of absolute space, which could not be
an object of experience ‘for space with-
out matter is no object of perception,
and yet it is a necessary concept of rea-
son, and thus nothing more than a mere
idea’ (MFNS 559). Kant argued that we
can only have empirical representations
of space, whereby matter as the move-
able in space changes its relation with
respect to space itself as a material move-
able. The latter, in turn, can be regarded
as contained into a bigger, yet still mate-
rial space, and so on to infinity, with
the result that ‘all motion or rest can be
relative only and never absolute’ (MFNS
559). Absolute space then becomes the
ideal limit of this open-ended sequence of
nested material spaces.
(3) The chapter on Mechanics offers three
laws of motion, whose relation to
Newton’s three laws remains a matter of
145
Sources and Influences
debate among scholars. Kant’s first law
expresses the conservation of quantity
of matter, and as such does not have an
equivalent in Newton’s laws. Kant’s sec-
ond law bears important similarities with
Newton’s first law, although by ‘inertia’
Kant means ‘lifelessness’ of matter, and he
mentions an ‘external cause’ for changes
of inertial state but no impressed forces.
Newton’s second law, with the notion
of impressed force, is strikingly absent
from Kant’s mechanics. And Kant’s third
law, i.e. action and reaction are always
equal in all communication of motion,
is once again not understood in terms of
impressed forces, as in Newton.
Some scholars (most notably, Michael
Friedman)89 have explained away these dif-
ferences between Newton and Kant by argu-
ing that Newton’s second law can indirectly
be derived from Kant’s third law, and that
Kant’s third law is in turn just a version of
Newton’s third law. Other scholars90 have
argued instead that the Leibnizian-Wolffian
tradition, rather than Newton, provides the
background against which we should read
Kant’s laws: in defending the view that reac-
tion was not a passive force of resistance,
Kant signalled that his main interlocutors
were Leibniz and Wolff, who indeed identi-
fied reaction with a passive force of bod-
ies called ‘inertia’. Thus, the exact nature
of Newton’s influence on Kant’s philoso-
phy of natural science remains a matter of
debate. – MM
Plato
Kant’s philosophy is not particularly known
for its historical orientation. His critical
project in philosophy entails an explicit
Sources and Influences
breach with the preceding tradition of meta-
physics. In his wish to make a new start in
philosophy by means of a critical investiga-
tion of the human capacity for knowledge,
Kant turns away from the older philosophy.
He still acknowledges the ‘great philoso-
phers’ of the past, but their authority is no
longer taken for granted.
In Kant’s Critical works, Plato is men-
tioned a few times in a significant way. In
an interesting passage in the ‘Introduction’
of CPR, Kant refers critically to Plato as an
example of the tendency of reason to free
itself from the restriction of the senses in the
mistaken assumption that knowledge would
come easier in a ‘free flight’ without the
resistance from the part of the senses. Kant
writes:
The light dove, in free flight cutting
through the air the resistance of which
it feels, could get the idea that it could
do even better in airless space. Likewise,
Plato abandoned the world of the senses
because it posed so many hindrances
for the understanding, and dared to go
beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in
the empty space of pure understanding.
He did not notice that he made no head-
way by his efforts, for he had no resist-
ance, no support, as it were, by which he
could stiffen himself, and to which he
could apply his powers in order to get his
understanding off the ground. (A5=B9)
Kant considers himself a critic of Platonism.
For him, the fault of Platonism consists in
the attempt of reason to elevate itself above
the world of the senses in order to contem-
plate the Ideas in the supersensory realm of
truth.
An interesting passage where Kant refers
to the ‘idea’ of Plato is in the chapter on the
Ideal of Pure Reason, in the second book of
146
the Transcendental Dialectic (A568=B596).
Kant introduces here the notion of an ‘ideal’.
An ideal is the single instantiation of an idea in
its complete perfection. Kant compares such
an ‘ideal’ with what in Plato is the transcend-
ent idea (Idee des göttlichen Verstandes), that
is, the true and perfect essence of each thing,
which as such can only be an object of an
intellectual intuition. It is clear that, for Kant,
such Platonic ideas existing in a supersensory
divine realm are not acceptable. Kant wants
to bring back the divine ideas to the sphere of
human reason, in which ideal notions func-
tion as regulative principles in a practical
sense. So instead of transcendent ideas which
are the object of an intellectual intuition,
Kant speaks of ideas of pure reason which
have but a regulative status.
In Kant’s oeuvre, there is one work in
which Plato is mentioned and discussed
in a more than marginal sense. This is in
the late polemical essay PTS from 1796,
which Kant wrote on the occasion of the
Platonist inspired critique by Schlosser of
his philosophy. Schlosser published his cri-
tique of Kant together with a translation of
the letters of Plato.91 The famous Seventh
Letter represents for Schlosser the para-
digm of true divinely inspired philosophy.
In this letter, Plato distinguishes between
different degrees of knowledge. The high-
est and most perfect degree of knowledge
concerns the ‘thing itself in its truth’, which
is accessible by an immediate non-cognitive
insight:
This knowledge is not something that
can be put into words like other sciences;
but after long companionship with it, as
between teacher and pupil in joint pur-
suit of the subject, suddenly, like light
flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it
is born in the soul and straightway nour-
ishes itself.

This is the mystical side of Plato which is
popular with all kinds of theosophical and
mystical conceptions of philosophy. This
Plato is, according to Kant, ‘the father of all
enthusiasm [Schwärmerei] by way of philos-
ophy’ (PTS 398), that is, of the belief in the
possibility of non-cognitive insight by way of
inner feeling and intuition, a view which is
entirely rejected by Kant.
Kant’s objection to Plato concerns prima-
rily the point of intellectual intuition. In Kant’s
view, Plato’s philosophy is ‘mystical’, at least
the Plato of the Letters: man closes his eyes
in order to contemplate by means of the soul
the higher truth of the ideas. Kant sees a link
between Plato and the contemporary phi-
losophers of sentiment (Gefühlsphilosophen)
who in their appeal to an immediate feeling
of the truth consider themselves to be exempt
from the long and laborious way of concep-
tual thought. He disparages strongly the idea
of a philosopher who does not have to work,
but listens instead to his inner oracle.
The verdict on mysticism and enthusiasm,
however, is not Kant’s final word with regard
to such a great and respected philosopher as
Plato. Kant suggests that Plato is misused by
the Gefühlsphilosophen such as Schlosser.
Plato himself  – that is, the serious Plato of
the dialogues, not the ‘mystagogue’ of the
dubious Seventh Letter  – should have used
the intellectual intuition only regressively in
order to explain the possibility of synthetic
knowledge a priori (see PTS 391n.). Here,
Kant refers to the doctrine of ἀνάμνησις, by
means of which Plato accounts for the non-
empirical element in our knowledge. In this
sense, Plato had already known the central
question of all serious philosophy, viz. the
question concerning the possibility of syn-
thetic judgments a priori. In addition, Kant
points out that Plato founded the Academy,
which proves that he himself had recognized
147
Sources and Influences
the necessity of conceptual labour in philos-
ophy. Kant’s judgment of Plato is, thus, not
merely negative. As source of inspiration of
the Gefühlsphilosophen, especially on the
basis of his Seventh Letter, he belongs to the
camp of false and esoteric philosophy, of a
philosophy of ‘fire in the soul’. But there is
another Plato, much more to be respected,
one who has touched on, albeit hesitantly,
the essential question of philosophy concern-
ing the possibility of synthetic knowledge a
priori. – RtV
Further Reading
R. Bubner, ‘Platon der Vater aller
Schwärmerei’, in Antike Themen und ihre
moderne Verwandlung (Frankfurt a/M:
Suhrkamp, 1992), pp. 80–93.
R. Ferber, ‘Platon und Kant’, in A. Neschke-
Hentschke (ed.), Argumenta in dialogos
Platonis, Teil 1. Platoninterpretation und
ihre Hermeneutik von der Antike bis
zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts (Basel:
Schwabe, 2007), pp. 371–390.
H. Heimsoeth, ‘Plato in Kants Werdegang’,
in H. Heimsoeth, D. Henrich, G. Tonelli
(eds), Studien zu Kants philosopher
Entwicklung (Hildesheim: Olms, 1967),
pp. 124–143.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
In 1756, → Mendelssohn translated Jean-
Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality
(1755) into German, and Johann Georg
Hamann mentioned Rousseau in a December
1759 letter to Kant (Corr-I 30). The influence
of Rousseau (1712–78) on Kant was pro-
found, and it came most forcefully when Kant
was about forty, as notes written in Kant’s
Sources and Influences
own copy of Obs around 1764–65 reveal.
In those notes, he claimed that Rousseau
stood to the moral world as → Newton did
to the natural world (Obs-R 58–59). The
Swiss thinker’s influence on Kant was above
all (but not exclusively) in anthropology and
social philosophy, pedagogy, ethics and polit-
ical philosophy.
In his writings in the 1750s, Kant mostly
examined natural philosophy (physics and
geography) and theoretical metaphysics.
After reading the British empiricists (→
Empiricism) and especially Rousseau’s Émile
and Of the Social Contract (both published
in 1762), Kant addressed the ends of human
nature, intrigued by Rousseau’s notion of
the difference between natural and civilized
human beings. Rousseau led Kant to recon-
sider the aims of the arts and sciences and
especially philosophy, to think that philoso-
phy should have practical and moral conse-
quences, and to believe that knowledge for
its own sake was not sufficient to justify
intellectual pursuits.
On might think that the Swiss thinker did
not influence CPR, which Kant was still com-
posing when Rousseau died in 1778, but the
very notion that reason was in need of a cri-
tique is in part traceable back to Rousseau’s
diagnoses that social ills were caused by a use
of reason that overstepped its bounds, creating
desires it could not satisfy. (‘Diminish desires,
and you will increase strength’, Rousseau
advised in Émile.) This arguably influenced
Kant’s claim that pure theoretical reason had
a natural and inevitable tendency to fall into
an illusory dialectic that could be properly
understood, if not avoided (A298=B354). In
the notes that reflect Rousseau’s influence,
Kant had defined metaphysics as ‘the science
of the limits of human reason’ (Obs-R 181),
and in the contemporaneous DSS (1766)
Kant published this definition of metaphysics
148
(DSS 368). Rousseau’s accounts of reason
and alienation and the generally practical
orientation of his philosophy also arguably
influenced Kant’s assertion that pure practi-
cal reason was primary vis-à-vis speculative
reason (CPrR 119).
Anthropology and social philosophy. In
late 1763 Kant saw the discovery of a boy
roaming outside → Königsberg as confirma-
tion of Rousseau’s anthropology, as EMH
(1764) showed. Kant’s notes reveal that he
was moved by Rousseau yet struggled not
to be enchanted by his style and wit. Kant
famously claimed that Rousseau ‘set him
straight’ and inspired him to defend the rights
of humanity, whereas before he had thought
that one’s worth was linked to intellectual
achievements (Obs-R 44). He held that
Rousseau was the first to discover ‘the deeply
hidden nature of humanity’ and ‘the secret
law whose observation justifies Providence’
(Obs-R 58–59), and that whereas ‘belief in
inequality also makes human beings une-
qual’, only Rousseau’s teaching could make
it so that even the most learned philosopher
did not see himself as better than the com-
mon man (Obs-R 176). Yet he had to keep
reading Rousseau until the beauty of expres-
sion did not unsettle him and he could read
again with reason (Obs-R 30). His reading
proceeded in stages, from a first impression
of finding an ‘uncommon mental acuity, a
noble flight of genius, and a sensitive soul’,
followed by the impression of ‘alienation
over strange and nonsensical opinions’ that
conflicted so strongly with general opin-
ions that one was inclined to suppose that
Rousseau only wanted to show off the magi-
cal power of his eloquence (Obs-R 43–44).
This view of philosophical writing perhaps
helps us better understand Kant’s conscious
adoption of a relatively dry and abstract style
in the Critiques, as the → Bacon epigraph at

the beginning of the B-edition of CPR dem-
onstrates: de nobis ipsis silemus (‘of our own
person we will say nothing’) (Bii).
Contrasting his method with Rousseau’s
‘synthetic’ method, which began with the
human being in the state of nature, Kant
described his method as ‘analytic’ since it
examined humans in the civilized condition
(Obs-R 14). In the notes, Kant adopted a
Rousseauian distinction between a primitive
innocence, ignorant of artificial goods, and a
wise innocence (Obs-R 77) that was familiar
with, yet controlled, artificial impulses. Kant
assessed the happiness of primitive humans
not in order to ‘return to the forests’, but to
see how far humanity had been artificially
constructed and what had thereby been
lost or gained (Obs-R 31; cf. Anthr 326).
Likewise, in a published announcement of his
lectures (1765), Kant distinguished between
wise (‘civilized’) and primitive innocence,
and urged us to understand human nature
before attempting to state what should be
done (AL 311–312; cf. Anthr 326–327).
Kant agreed with Rousseau that the arts
and sciences required a degree of corrupting
luxury, but also believed they ‘cultivated’ us
(UH 27). Although Kant agreed that social
decorum could have a negative influence, he
thought Rousseau failed to offer a compel-
ling plan for bringing about the final, most
important stage of humanity’s development:
moralization (UH 26; cf. CBH 116; Anthr
324). In addition, what Rousseau called
amour propre emerged as Kant’s key notions
of self-conceit (CPrR 73), unsocial sociabil-
ity (UH 20), and radical propensity to evil
(R 28–32).
Kant held that Rousseau’s writings seemed
to conflict with each other and were often
misinterpreted. Kant thought Rousseau’s two
Discourses correctly showed the unavoidable
conflict of culture with our physical nature,
149
Sources and Influences
but also that in Émile and Of the Social
Contract and ‘other writings’, Rousseau
sought to solve the harder problem of how
to reconcile moral and natural predisposi-
tions (CBH 116). Yet Kant held that since the
proper education of the youth and citizens
had not yet been carried out, every ill and
vice arose from this culture-nature conflict.
Pedagogy. Kant had worked as a pri-
vate tutor for well-off families between
1747 and 1754, before returning to the
Albertina University. Kant concluded Obs
(1764), which even contained a footnote on
Rousseau (Obs 246), with Rousseauian ref-
erences to ‘noble simplicity’ and the ‘as yet
undiscovered secret of education’ (Obs 255).
Yet Kant’s call to activate and raise the moral
feeling in the breast of ‘every young citizen of
the world’ revealed a cosmopolitanism that
went beyond Rousseau.
The notes again showed a deeper, more
critical reception of Rousseau. While Kant
agreed with him that education should be
‘free’ and also ‘make a free man’ (Obs-R
167), Kant did not see how Rousseau’s pro-
gramme for the pupil Émile could be made
practical for instruction in schools (Obs-R
29). Perhaps drawing from his experiences
as a tutor, Kant considered Rousseau’s ideas
impractical since they were based on a tutor-
governor model, for in order for schools to be
possible, one must ‘draw on’ or extend Émile
and show ‘how schools could arise from it’
(Obs-R 29). Yet Kant esteemed Rousseau’s
views on education, calling them the ‘only
means of bringing prosperity back to civil
society’ in an age of luxury, since political
laws apparently did not suffice (Obs-R 175).
A Rousseauian, naturalist, and child-cen-
tred approach to teaching was ground for
Kant’s avid support of the Philanthropinum
Institute established by Johann Bernard
Basedow (1724–90) in Dessau in 1774,
Sources and Influences
as anthropology lecture notes reveal (LA
722–723). In EPh, Kant held that the proper
educational method should be derived from
nature and that schools should develop new
methods that did not slavishly copy habit and
tradition (EPh 449). In his pedagogy course,
given four times between 1776 and 1787,
Kant cited Rousseau often – for instance, to
support his views that discipline should come
before informative instruction and that the
development of children’s bodies through
physical activity shapes them for society (LP
469; cf. 442).
Ethics and political philosophy. Kant’s
appeal to common moral knowledge in
the first section of G shares the spirit of
Rousseau’s conviction that fundamental
moral truth is just as accessible to common
human reason as to philosophical reason.
Moreover, there is a superficial resemblance
between Kant’s view of autonomy as the
property of the will to be a law to itself (G
440) and to both Rousseau’s moral liberty
(‘obedience to a law which we prescribe to
ourselves’) and civil liberty limited by the
general will (volonté générale).92 G’s Formula
of Autonomy (G 431), and its variant, the
Formula of the Realm of Ends (G 439), also
sound somewhat like Rousseau’s claim that
citizens should be subject to laws that they
themselves author. However, these notions
are at most analogous. Rousseau’s claim
applies to legislators of a political law in a
community of citizens, that is, to deliberation
and the public process of voting in an ideal
state, and he presents a political theory con-
cerned with coercive laws of a state within a
limited jurisdiction. A citizen can be ‘forced
to be free’,93 and a public authority exists
to ensure that the laws are obeyed. Kant’s
ethical theory is based on autonomy as (non-
coercive) inner legislation of the will. Here
autonomy is ascribed to all rational beings,
150
not just to citizens of a particular political
community (and it is not to be confused
with autocracy, or self-mastery and control
of inclinations). Kantian autonomy of the
will is an internalization of what remains in
Rousseau a political notion.
Like the author of Of the Social Contract,
in MM Kant developed a social contract
theory. Moreover, Kant’s thoughts on global
peace explicitly referred to Rousseau, who
himself publicly endorsed a European alli-
ance for peace (1761). However, Kant pro-
posed a cosmopolitan (not just European)
federation of states (PP 360, cf. MM 352),
which he believed Rousseau ridiculed as fan-
tastic – since Rousseau may have considered
the league to be imminent (UH 24). In the
notes, Kant had repudiated a general love of
humanity since it could lead to chimerical,
idle wishes (Obs-R 25), but his later theories
of respect for humanity and human rights,
so indebted to Rousseau, were arguably not
subject to this criticism (MM 352). – RC
Further Reading
E. Cassirer, Kant, Rousseau, and Goethe
(New York: Harper and Row, 1963).
K. Reich, ‘Rousseau und Kant’, in K. Reich,
Gesammelte Schriften, ed. M. Baum
(Hamburg: Meiner, 2001), pp. 147–165.
S. Shell, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009).
S. Shell, R. Velkley (eds), Kant’s
Observations and Remarks: A Critical
Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012).
R. Velkley, ‘Transcending nature, unifying
reason: on Kant’s debt to Rousseau’, in
O. Sensen (ed.), Kant on Moral Autonomy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), pp. 89–106.

Swedenborg, Emanuel
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a
widely published Swedish scientist, inventor,
philosopher and Assessor of the College of
Mines. In his fifties, Swedenborg experienced
a spiritual crisis including a series of mystical
visions, and he turned his attention to Biblical
studies and theology. In April of 1745, these
visions culminated in the experience of being
chosen as a visionary. Swedenborg claimed
that God had granted him access at will to the
spiritual world and charged him with the task
of revealing the inner meaning of the Bible.
Swedenborg retired from public service in
June 1745, and until the end of his life, he was
principally engaged in writing and publishing
exegetical, theological and visionary writings.
The first and most famous of Swedenborg’s
mature theosophical works is the Arcana
Coelestia, published in 8 volumes between
1749 and 1756, in which Swedenborg
explains the inner sense of every word of
Genesis and Exodus. Between the exegetical
chapters, Swedenborg offers accounts of his
visionary journeys to heaven, hell and the
spiritual world where he conversed with the
spirits of human beings and the inhabitants
of other planets.
Kant’s surviving corpus contains explicit
references to Swedenborg from 1763 to
1798.94 Also, virtually every reference to
enthusiasm (Schwärmerei) in Kant’s corpus
after 1764 can be interpreted as at least in
part an allusion to Swedenborg. The first
mention of Swedenborg is in a long let-
ter dated 10 August 1763 (Corr-I 43–48),
addressed to a young female friend, Charlotte
von Knobloch, in which Kant reported on
extensive research he had undertaken at
her request on Swedenborg’s reputation as
a clairvoyant. The letter provides the most
detailed descriptions extant of three famous
151
Sources and Influences
clairvoyant feats, the so-called affairs of the
Queen’s Secret, the Lost Receipt and the
Stockholm Fire, although all the events are
attested to by other, independent sources.95
Kant makes it clear that he was not inves-
tigating Swedenborg just to please a lady. He
was intensely interested in clairvoyance. He
investigated the reports for about 18 months,
corresponding with several individuals,
including Swedenborg himself, and dispatch-
ing a friend, an English merchant based in →
Königsberg with business in Sweden, to inter-
view Swedenborg and several witnesses. He
also parted with £7 (a considerable sum for
him) for a set of the Arcana Coelestia (which
had not yet arrived at the time he wrote the
letter). Kant concludes, moreover, that after
due investigation, he was quite convinced that
Swedenborg had genuine clairvoyant powers.
According to Johann Gottfried → Herder’s
notes on Kant’s LM, dating from 1763–64,
Kant mentioned the Arcana Coelestia in his
lectures.96 In a letter to Moses → Mendelssohn
dated 6 November 1764, Johann Georg
Hamann reported that Kant was working
on a review of the ‘opera omnia’ of ‘a cer-
tain Schwedenberg [sic]’.97 This review grew
into Kant’s longest work on Swedenborg, the
book DSS, published at the end of 1765 but
dated 1766. DSS is one of the last of Kant’s
‘pre-Critical’ writings, and it is the first in
which he sketches out the agenda and basic
tenets of his Critical philosophy.
Part I of DSS, ‘which is dogmatic’, con-
sists of four chapters. Chapter 1, entitled ‘A
Tangled Metaphysical Knot that can be either
Untied or Cut as One Pleases’ (DSS 319),
outlines Kant’s early metaphysics and poses
a problem brought home to him through
his encounter with → Rousseau’s Émile and
On the Social Contract in 1763: What is the
place of the human soul  – which possesses
freedom, moral responsibility and intrinsic
Sources and Influences
worth, not to mention aspirations to immor-
tality – in Kant’s materialistic metaphysics?
Chapter 2, entitled ‘A Fragment of Occult
Philosophy, the Purpose of which is to Reveal
Our Community with the Spirit-World’
(DSS 329), offers a dualistic resolution to this
question, dividing the cosmos into material
and spiritual worlds, the former governed by
laws of necessity and the latter governed by
laws of freedom. Man has dual citizenship
and thus falls under both regimes. The moral
problem is to live by the laws of freedom in
the material world. Although Kant erects his
account of the spirit world on metaphysi-
cal foundations, his blueprints clearly come
directly from Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia.
Chapter 3, entitled ‘Anti-Cabbala  – A
Fragment of Ordinary Philosophy, the Purpose
of which is to Cancel Community with the
Spirit-World’ (DSS 342), is a sceptical cri-
tique of the previous chapter from the point
of view of the empiricist Popularphilosophie
of the Berlin Enlightenment. This chapter
must not be seen as representing Kant’s own
viewpoint. Indeed, the arguments he offers
are rhetorically and logically self-refuting.98
Kant does, however, accept one premise of
this critique, namely that any notion of a spir-
itual world cannot be based upon a claim to
mystical intuition, which is accessible only to
the elect, but must instead rest on experiences
and arguments that all men can understand.
In chapter 4, entitled ‘Theoretical
Conclusion Established on the Basis of All
the Observations Contained in the First Part’
(DSS 348–349), Kant proposes to begin again.
His account of the spirit world may resolve
the problems of his early metaphysics, but
he accepts that it needs new, non-dogmatic,
non-mystical foundations. Because theo-
retical reason has a tendency to overreach
its grasp and launch itself into groundless
speculation, Kant states that we must first
152
delimit its powers, tying reason to common
experience before we philosophize. But since
the idea of a spiritual world answers to some
of the deepest needs of the human soul – the
need to believe in our freedom, moral respon-
sibility and survival after death – Kant argues
that practical reason can provide grounds for
belief that theoretical reason cannot.
Part II, ‘which is historical’, deals explicitly
with Swedenborg, who is discussed in the most
scathing terms. Chapter 1, entitled ‘A Story,
the Truth of which is Recommended to the
Reader’s Own Free Examination’ (DSS 353),
retells the stories of Swedenborg’s three clair-
voyant feats described in his letter to Charlotte
von Knobloch. But in DSS, Kant treats them
as mere unconfirmed rumours and does not
mention his extensive research and attempts to
corroborate them. Chapter 2, entitled ‘Ecstatic
Journey of an Enthusiast through the Spirit-
World’ (DSS 357), is a masterful condensation
of the essence of Swedenborg’s account of the
spirit world in the Arcana Coelestia.
Chapter 3, entitled ‘Practical Conclusion
Drawn from the Treatise as a Whole’ (DSS
368), returns to the idea that philosophy can
guard itself from metaphysical absurdities
like Swedenborg’s only by first delimiting
the powers of theoretical reason. Kant then
concludes by recommending a turn to the
practical. However, as we have seen from the
conclusion of Part I of DSS, the turn toward
practice can provide a new foundation for
belief in a spiritual world.
DSS is the first work of Kant’s in which the
outlines of his mature Critical philosophy are
set forth. But what role did Swedenborg play
in the emergence of the Critical philosophy?
Kant’s dismissive treatment of Swedenborg in
DSS naturally leads most scholars to conclude
that he was merely chosen as a reductio ad
absurdum of dogmatic metaphysics.99 Some
scholars, however, have noted a contradiction

between DSS and Kant’s respectful remarks
about Swedenborg in his letter to Charlotte
von Knobloch and student notes on his lec-
tures on metaphysics. They have hypoth-
esized that Kant may have dissembled his
more positive views because Swedenborg
was regarded as a heretic by the ecclesias-
tical establishment and as an enthusiast by
the Enlightenment. Known sympathies with
Swedenborg might have harmed Kant’s aca-
demic career.100 Mendelssohn clearly regarded
Kant as being deceptive in DSS, and Kant’s
letter to Mendelssohn of 8 April 1766 (Corr-I
69–73) is an attempt at damage control.101
It can be argued, furthermore, that sev-
eral crucial ideas of Kant’s Critical system
are influenced by Swedenborg. For instance,
Swedenborg’s account of the spiritual world
contains a doctrine of the ideality of space
and time, space and time being ways in which
spiritual relations appear to finite, embodied
knowers.102 Also, Kant’s doctrine of the ‘king-
dom of ends’ derives from Swedenborg’s spirit
world. Indeed, Swedenborg even describes
the spirit world as a kingdom of ends (reg-
num finium) in the Arcana Coelestia.103
DSS contains Kant’s longest discussion
of Swedenborg, but it was by no means his
last. Numerous references to Swedenborg
can be found in students’ lectures notes (LM
113, 298–301, 447, 593, 689, 768, 897, and
LM-M/V 919–920). These references appear
in Kant’s discussions of the state of the soul
after death in the section on rational psychol-
ogy. At LM 298–301, Kant’s discussion of
Swedenborg is detailed and highly respectful.
Swedenborg’s idea of the spirit world is here
indeed described as ‘quite sublime’.104
Furthermore, in DRTBaum 1325, Kant
reportedly mentions Swedenborg’s account
of life on other planets and concludes: ‘He
appears, therefore, to have been a deliberate
fraud’. In LA 284, Swedenborg is mentioned
153
Sources and Influences
in connection with enthusiasm. In LA 1059,
Swedenborg is offered as an example of
the connection of genius and madness
(Wahnsinn). Swedenborg is also mentioned in
two Reflexionen from the 1770s: Refl 1486,
where Swedenborg is cited as an example of
enthusiasts and mystics who offer symbolic
interpretations of the Bible, and Refl 5026,
where Swedenborg is offered as an example
of appeal to intellectual intuition.
In CF 46 and Anthr 191–192, Swedenborg
is mentioned in connection with the sym-
bolic interpretation of scripture, nature,
and historical events.105 Kant believes that
Swedenborg’s symbolic interpretation of
scripture is a form of enthusiasm because it
is based on a claim to special divine election
and is thus not intersubjectively verifiable.
Kant does, however, share Swedenborg’s
desire to interpret phenomena symbolically,
but he argues that such interpretations must
be based on his moral philosophy, which is
intersubjectively verifiable.
Kant’s interest in Swedenborg was intense,
long-standing and philosophically fruitful. In
particular, Swedenborg must be ranked along-
side Rousseau as one of the prime influences
on the emergence of Kant’s Critical philoso-
phy.106 The Kant–Swedenborg relationship
is, however, relatively unexplored and is thus
fertile ground for future research. – GJ
Further Reading
M. David-Ménard, La folie dans la raison
pure: Kant lecteur de Swedenborg (Paris:
Vrin, 1990).
M. Grier, ‘Swedenborg and Kant on
spiritual intuition’, in S. McNeilly (ed.),
On the True Philosopher and the True
Philosophy – Essays on Swedenborg
(London: The Swedenborg Society, 2002),
pp. 1–20.
Sources and Influences
G. Johnson, ‘The tree of melancholy: Kant
on philosophy and enthusiasm’, in
C. Firestone, S. Palmquist (eds), Kant
and the New Philosophy of Religion
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2006), pp. 43–61.
S. Meld Shell, The Embodiment of
Reason. Kant on Spirit, Generation, and
Community (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), ch. 5.
L. Thorpe, ‘The realm of ends as a
community of spirits: Kant and
Swedenborg on the kingdom of heaven
and the cleansing of the doors of
perception’, The Heythrop Journal 52,1
(2011): 52–75.
Tetens, Johann Nicolaus
Johann Nicolaus (sometimes Nicolas) Tetens
(1736–1807) was among the most influ-
ential German philosophers in the 1770s,
mainly due to his voluminous Philosophische
Versuche über die menschliche Natur und
ihre Entwickelung (1777). He was a philoso-
phy professor in Bützow and Kiel until 1789,
when he left academia to embark on a sec-
ond career as a public servant in the Danish
finance ministry where he became, among
other positions, vice director of the Danish
national bank.
Tetens is a representative of a general
empiricist tendency in German philoso-
phy between the late 1750s and 1780s.
Dissatisfied with rigid Wolffianism (→
Wolff), quite a few of his contempo-
raries  – including figures such as Ernst
Platner, Johann Georg Feder (→ Garve-
Feder review), Christian Garve (→ Garve-
Feder review) and, to a lesser extent, also
Moses → Mendelssohn and Johann Georg
154
Sulzer  – began discussing and appreciating
British, Scottish and French → empiricism
while, on the other hand, retaining much
of the conceptual framework and the basic
assumptions of the Wolffian tradition. It is
in this context that Tetens is often called the
‘German Locke’ (→ Locke).107 Tetens and his
contemporaries, today largely unknown, are
thus forerunners of Kant’s endeavour to rec-
oncile empiricism and rationalism. Tetens is
also considered an important predecessor of
developmental psychology.
Philosophische Versuche (like its shorter
antecedent Ueber die allgemeine specu-
lativische Philosophie, from 1775) is mainly
intended as a work in empirical psychology
(Erfahrungs-Seelenlehre). Structured rather
loosely, it includes a broad range of issues
such as the nature of representation (first
essay), feelings, impressions and sensations
(second essay), the origin of our cognition of
the objective existence of things (fifth essay),
the necessity of the universal truths of rea-
son (seventh essay), spontaneity and freedom
(twelfth essay) or man’s perfectibility and
development (fourteenth essay).
Tetens insists that all knowledge of reality
is based on both observation and reasoning
(‘Raisonnement’).108 He aims at a synthesis of
‘British observational’ philosophy with ‘French
arguing’ philosophy and the ‘geometrical gen-
ius of Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy’.109 Tetens
argues: ‘As much as I have taken care to avoid
blending hypotheses into experiential propo-
sitions, I did not avoid drawing inferences and
conclusions from the observations and thus
conjoining them’.110 According to Tetens, we
have to ‘pursue the course to which Locke has
first guided us, with the torch of observation
in his hand, to find the sensations from which
the general notions are derived’.111 He leaves
no doubt that all concepts are derivative of
sensations.112

With regard to psychology, Tetens
renounces physiological anthropology which
was flourishing at the time. Physiological
anthropology is based on the attempt to
explain mental features and events by modi-
fications of the brain and the nervous sys-
tem (without necessarily subscribing to a
materialist ontology). Tetens instead prefers
a Lockean ‘observational method’ that con-
fines itself to what we observe in inner sense
and abstains from further speculations.113
Tetens’ peculiar attempt to synthesize
rationalism and empiricism becomes obvious,
for instance, when he criticizes → Hume’s
theory of causality. Tetens doubts that when
we claim an event to be the cause of another
one, we are merely associating ideas: ‘Does
not this connection of ideas include more,
something that is the real reason to make the
understanding judge: Here, we find cause and
effect? Is the association of ideas not con-
nected to a certain necessity, wherever it may
have originated?’114 Elsewhere, he argues in
some detail that the idea of causal connection
covers more than a connection, viz. an idea of
dependence that is not included in Humean
association.115 Thus, the ideas of necessity
and dependence are what reason irreduc-
ibly contributes to our concept of causality,
according to Tetens.
Tetens discusses Kant’s ID on various occa-
sions, for instance with regard to the concept
of space. Tetens argues that the concept of
space as a whole is an individual idea, and
he considers himself in agreement with Kant
here: ‘What else did Herr Kant, the profound
philosopher who studies the understanding
so acutely, intend to argue when he takes
space to be an intuitive idea?’116
There is sufficient evidence that Kant has
dealt with Tetens’ views to a considerable
degree. In letters to Marcus → Herz (Corr-I
270), Moses Mendelssohn (Corr-I 346) and
155
Sources and Influences
Christian Garve (Corr-I 341) Kant suspects
that only Tetens, besides Herz, Mendelssohn
and Garve, could be in a position to fully
grasp the importance of his Critical philoso-
phy, requesting their assistance in explain-
ing and disseminating his doctrine. Johann
Georg Hamann notes in a letter to Johann
Gottfried → Herder that Kant was making
frequent use of Tetens’ works while he was
writing CPR;117 in an earlier letter to Herder,
he says that Kant is ‘very full of’ Tetens.118
However, Kant is also critical of Tetens.
In another letter to Herz (Corr-I 232), he
finds fault with the lack of structure and the
redundancy especially of the second volume
of Philosophische Untersuchungen. In Refl
4900, Kant distinguishes his own approach
from that of both Tetens and Johann Heinrich
→ Lambert: ‘I concern myself not with the
evolution of concepts, like Tetens (all actions
by means of which concepts are produced),
nor with their analysis, like Lambert, but
solely with their objective validity. I am not
in competition with [Mitbewerber] these
men.’ – FW
Further Reading
H.-U. Baumgarten, Kant und Tetens.
Untersuchungen zum Problem von
Vorstellung und Gegenstand (Stuttgart:
J. B. Metzler, 1992).
M. Kuehn, ‘Tetens, Johann Nicolas’, in H.
Klemme, M. Kuehn (eds), The Dictionary
of Eighteenth Century German
Philosophers (London: Continuum,
2010), vol. 3, pp. 1163–1169.
S. Stapleford, ‘A Refutation of Idealism
from 1777’, Idealistic Studies 40 (2010):
139–147.
E. Watkins, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
Background Source Materials (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), ch. 9.
Sources and Influences
Wolff, Christian
Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was the
leading philosopher of the early German
Enlightenment who contributed to forging
the German philosophical vocabulary, the
understanding of method and the architec-
ture of a systematic philosophy adopted and
criticized by Kant in almost equal measure.
A teacher at the Pietist University of Halle
until his expulsion in 1723 on the grounds
of the threat his rationalist philosophy posed
to religious orthodoxy, Wolff returned to his
institution in 1740 upon the accession of →
Frederick the Great to the throne of → Prussia
as a symbol of the new ‘enlightened’ relation-
ship between church and state. He produced
two versions of his philosophical system, one
written in the vernacular between 1713 and
1721 addressed to a broad German reading
public and another more voluminous version
in Latin written in exile between 1723 and
1740 for a European ‘learned’ audience. His
system is the most plausible, historically spe-
cific candidate for the ‘pure reason’ criticized
by Kant in CPR.
Wolff’s reputation and influence among the
general public and German universities was
enormous for most of the eighteenth century,
although they did not survive the constant
and sustained level of criticism that culmi-
nated in Kant’s critical philosophy. While
his thought was commonly paired with →
Leibniz as the ‘Leibnizian-Wolffian philoso-
phy’ it diverged considerably from that of his
predecessor. While Wolff adopted the frame-
work of degrees of perception ranging from
obscure/confused to clear perception devel-
oped by Leibniz, it was without the latter’s
conviction that these degrees formed a con-
tinuum and were part of a dynamic unfolding
of consciousness. He adopted the vocabulary
of Leibniz, but put it to the service of a formal
156
rationalism which came to characterize the
early German Enlightenment and which Kant
would describe as ‘dogmatic’. The ‘dogmatism’
in question consisted in the centrality of the
principle of contradiction from which Wolff
derived subsequent concepts such as ‘suffi-
cient reason’ and ‘causality’. Accompanying
the rational principle of contradiction was
a view of enlightenment as the domination
of the confusion of sense perception by the
rational clarity of the understanding.
Wolff rested his entire philosophical sys-
tem upon the principle of contradiction
beginning accordingly with logic, then mov-
ing to metaphysics and thence to an ethics
and politics. His commitment to ration-
alism is signalled by the titles of the parts
of the system, all of which begin with the
formula ‘rational thoughts’ (vernünfftige
Gedanken). The Logic was published as
Rational Thoughts on the Powers of the
Human Understanding and its Correct
use in the Knowledge of Truth (1713), the
Metaphysics as Rational Thoughts on God,
the World and the Human Soul as well as
on Things Overall (1719), the Ethics as
Rational Thoughts on Human Acts and
Omissions for the Promotion of Happiness
(1720) and the Politics as Rational Thoughts
on Human Social Life and in particular the
Commonwealth for the Promotion of the
Happiness of the Human Species (1721). A
short overview of the system was published
in 1728 as the Preliminary Discourse on
Philosophy in General.119 The most influen-
tial part of the system was the Metaphysics,
which dominated the teaching of philosophy
in Germany during the eighteenth century
and provided the general overall structure
for Kant’s CPR, albeit with some signifi-
cant and devastating specific changes such
as the introduction of a ‘Transcendental
Aesthetic’.

Kant’s assessment of Wolff’s contribution
was ambivalent: he could describe him, in DSS,
as one ‘who build[s] castles in the sky’ (DSS
342) – a dogmatist out of contact with real-
ity – as well as regarding him as a model for
the methodical pursuit of systematic philoso-
phy (cf. CPR Bxxxvi). Kant however, along
with many other critics of his and the earlier
generation of philosophers in Germany, could
not accept the axiomatic quality of the princi-
ple of contradiction which for Wolff held that
‘something cannot simultaneously be and
not-be’ (German Metaphysics, §6; transla-
tion mine). Kant’s putting into question of the
temporal assumptions contained in the word
‘simultaneously’ was prepared by a number
of philosophers in the 1730s and 1740s, most
notably → Baumgarten and → Crusius. He
also accepted their critique of Wolff’s view of
sensible perception as but a confused variety
of a rational perception of perfection.
His own critique of Wolff unfolded in four
broad phases, the first in which he attempts to
supplant Wolff’s ‘formal’ with ‘real’ grounds
of perception and reality, as in LF (1747), fol-
lowed by a second in which he develops the
distinction between sensible and intelligible
sources of knowledge evident in ID. Kant’s
basing the critical philosophy on the tran-
scendental distinction between sensible and
intelligible sources of knowledge and experi-
ence followed and was succeeded by a post-
critical defence of the achievements of the
critiques against neo-Leibnizian and Wolffian
critics such as → Eberhard in Disc and PE.
The most telling testimony to Kant’s debt
to Christian Wolff is CPR itself. The struc-
ture of CPR directly mirrors that of Wolff’s
German Metaphysics, making the former in
many ways into a critical gloss on the latter.
Wolff’s Metaphysics introduces the ‘science
of things in general’ or ontology (general
metaphysics) as the basis for the discussion
157
Sources and Influences
of the objects of the sub-disciplines of meta-
physics (special metaphysics), namely God
(theology), the World (cosmology) and the
Soul (rational and empirical psychology).
Kant’s ‘Transcendental Analytic’ was self-
consciously cast as the critical successor to
‘ontology’ (cf. B303=A247), and its achieve-
ment in setting the limits of knowledge and
experience to appearances provided the basis
for the critique of the sciences of theology,
cosmology and psychology that make up the
‘Transcendental Dialectic’ of CPR.
Wolff’s philosophy did not survive Kant’s
faithful demolition, in spite of the efforts of
some of its defenders. By the time Hegel deliv-
ered his lectures on the history of philosophy,
Wolff was a distant and unhappy memory. Yet
his achievement in providing the vocabulary,
structure and method of philosophy was vital
for the invention of the Critical philosophy,
and Wolff proved a worthy and resilient oppo-
nent for Kant. The significance of his work is
not exhausted by its role as the pure reason or
philosophical dogmatism opposed by Kant, as
his contribution to the creation of philosophi-
cal German remains an enduring legacy and
his controversial interest in Chinese philoso-
phy is just one of the areas of his work that
would reward fresh study. – HC
Further Reading
L. W. Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant
and his Predecessors (London: Thoemmes
Continuum, 1996 [1969]).
H. Caygill, Art of Judgement (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1989).
S. Grapotte, T. Prunea-Bretonnet (eds),
Kant et Wolff. Héritages et ruptures
(Paris: Vrin, 2011).
E. Watkins (ed.), Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
Background Source Materials (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), ch. 1.
Sources and Influences

Notes über natürliche Begebenheiten ordentlich und

­vorsichtig nachzudenken [1749]); quotations
1
Cf. Categories v; Metaphysics vii, 1–4. are from Die philosophische Hauptwerke,
2
Published as part of Franciscus de Verulamio ed. G. Tonelli, S. Carboncini, R. Finster
Summi Angliae Cancellaris Instauratio (Hildesheim, 1964–1987); translations are
magna, the New Organon, or True Directions my own.
Concerning the Interpretation of Nature. The
15
Crusius, Entwurf, §15, pp. 26–27; cf. Crusius,
edition used in this essay is Francis Bacon, The Weg zur Gewißheit, §262, pp. 475–476.
New Organon, ed. L. Jardine, M. Silverthorne
16
Crusius, Weg zur Gewißheit, §259, p. 469;
(Cambridge, 2000). cf. Entwurf, §31, p. 49, and §48, pp. 76–77.
3
Bacon, The New Organon, Book I, XXXVIII.
17
L. W. Beck, Early German Philosophy. Kant
4
Bacon, The New Organon, Book II, XIV. and His Predecessors (Cambridge, 1969),
5
See M. Sgarbi, Logica e metafisica nel Kant pre- pp. 394–402.
critico. L’ambiente intellettuale di Königsberg
18
The edition of Descartes’ work cited here is
e la formazione della filosofia kantiana Descartes, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Adam &
(Frankfurt, 2010), pp. 95–102. Tannery (AT) (Paris, 1996), followed by vol-
6
See M. Sgarbi, ‘The historical genesis of the ume and page numbers; translations are mine.
Kantian concept of transcendental’, Archiv für
19
This view rests ultimately on their firm belief
Begriffsgeschichte 53 (2011): 97–117. in what Descartes called the lumen naturale
7
A. G. Baumgarten, Metaphysica (Halle, 1739), and what Kant regards as the a priori nature
pp. 268–281. of reason, making both Kant and Descartes
8
Cf. F. T. Rink, Ansichten aus Immanuel Kant’s quintessential rationalists.
Leben (Königsberg, 1805), p. 19.
20
The locus classicus for a comparative study of
9
Cf. K. Reich, Kant und die Ethik der the Cartesian and Kantian cogito’s is
Griechen (Tübingen, 1935); also in K. Reich, P. Lachièze-Rey, L’idéalisme kantien (Paris,
Gesammelte Schriften, ed. M. Baum et al. 1931), ch. 1.
(Hamburg, 2001), pp. 113–146.
21
Descartes speaks of ‘obstinately’ adhering to
10
The Latin title is De finibus bonorum et the doubting procedure: ‘manebo obstinate in
malorum. hac meditatione defixus’ (AT VII, 23).
11
Cf. Abhandlung über die menschlichen
22
Some also claim that, in particular in the
Pflichten in drey Büchern (Breslau, 1783) and Refutation of Idealism (which replaced the
the commentary Philosophische Anmerkungen fourth Paralogism in the second edition of
und Abhandlungen zu Cicero’s Büchern von CPR and was in fact designed as a refutation
den Pflichten (Breslau, 1784). of what Kant calls Cartesian ‘problematic
12
Cf. C. M. Gilbert, Der Einfluß von Christian idealism’), Kant presents what has been called
Garves Übersetzung Ciceros ‚De Officiis‘ a transcendental argument that is anti-sceptical
auf Kants ‚Grundlegung der Metaphysik der in nature.
Sitten’ (Regensburg, 1994).
23
Notice that the famous cogito ergo sum does
13
M. Kuehn, ‘Kant and Cicero’, in Kant und die not appear as such in the Meditations. It occurs
Berliner Aufklärung, ed. V. Gerhardt, R.-P. in this form in the Discourse (‘Je pense, donc
Horstmann, R. Schumacher, vol. 3 (Berlin, je suis’) (AT VI, 33) and in the Principles of
2001), p. 272. Philosophy (‘Ego cogito, ergo sum) (AT VIII, 7).
14
These were extended and integrated in his In the Meditations itself, the pivotal statement ‘I
series of textbooks: on ethics (Anweisung, ver- am, I exist’ occurs at AT VII, 25, 27.
nünftig zu leben [1744]), metaphysics (Entwurf
24
In Kant’s so-called pre-Critical period,
der notwendigen Vernunft-Wahrheiten, Descartes is specifically addressed in his first
wiefern sie den zufälligen entgegen gesetzet work LF, and only briefly mentioned by name
werden [1745]), logic (Weg zur Gewißheit in NH, DSS, OPD, and Obs. After CPR, in the
und Zuverlässigkeit der menschlichen Critical period Descartes is mentioned in CJ
Erkenntnis [1747]), and physics (Anleitung, and Anthr.

158

25
See AT VII, 140–141. The locus classicus
for a discussion of this topic is J. Hintikka,
‘Cogito, ergo sum: inference of performance?’,
Philosophical Review LXXI (1962): 3–32. See
also the essential work on Descartes’ philoso-
phy of mind by H. Sarkar, Descartes’ Cogito.
Saved from the Great Shipwreck (Cambridge,
2003).
26
K. Düsing, ‘Kant und Epikur. Untersuchungen
zum Problem der Grundlegung einer Ethik’,
Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 1,2
(1976): 39–58, argues that Kant does not do
justice to the Epicurean principle of ἡδονή,
for he does not make the crucial distinction
between kinetic and katastematic lust.
27
Cf. Refl 6894, LE 253 and LE-M 621.
28
Cf. Refl 6894.
29
The French mathematician and cosmologist
Laplace referred to Euler as ‘the master of
us all’, urging mathematicians to read him
(W. Dunham, Euler: The Master of Us All
[Washington, 1999], p. xiii).
30
Euler’s pioneering work in setting up
graph theory was triggered by the famous
Königsberg bridge problem that exerted its
citizens (and, one can speculate, Kant’s family
among them) in the first half of the eighteenth
century. This is the problem of finding a path
crossing each bridge once and only once and
returning to its starting point (B. Hopkins,
R. Wilson, ‘The truth about Königsberg’, in
R. E. Bradley, C. E. Sandifer [eds], Leonhard
Euler: Life, Work and Legacy [Amsterdam,
2007], p. 410).
31
This did not prevent Voltaire from referring to
him as one who ‘never learnt philosophy’ (W.
Dunham, Euler: The Master of Us All,
p. xxvi). And the lack of esteem of his contem-
poraries for his philosophical acumen was well
matched by Euler’s disdain for philosophers
(W. Breidert, ‘Leonhard Euler and philosophy’,
in R. E. Bradley, C. E. Sandifer [eds], Leonhard
Euler: Life, Work and Legacy,
pp. 97–108).
32
W. Breidert, ‘Leonhard Euler and philosophy’,
p. 100.
33
See A. Speiser, Leonhard Euler und die
Deutsche Philosophie (Zürich, 1934), p. 8.
34
Speiser, Leonhard Euler und die Deutsche
Philosophie, p. 9.
159
Sources and Influences
35
M. Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences
(Cambridge, 1992), p. 15.
36
Euler, Réflexions sur l’espace et le temps, in
Opera Omnia, ed. C. Carathéodory, Series
Tertia, vol. 2 (Zürich, 1952), pp. 376–377.
37
Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences,
p. 19. This view is discussed extensively in Inq
276–286.
38
From 1758 (see MR 13–26), Kant’s views
did however differ from Leibniz’s in that his
relational notion of space was now grounded
on the analysis of motion, and the claim
that there is a preferred reference frame (J.
V. Buroker, Space and Incongruence: The
Origin of Kant’s Idealism [Dordrecht, 1981],
pp. 43–47). Moreover, his understanding
of the law of inertia and its incompatibility
with Leibnizian monadology can be seen as
influenced by Euler
(H. Timerding, ‘Kant und Euler’, Kant-
Studien 23 [1919]: 18–64).
39
See again Euler, Réflexions sur l’espace et le
temps.
40
Euler, Réflexions sur l’espace et le temps,
p. 381.
41
Buroker, Space and Incongruence, p. 51.
42
Breidert, ‘Leonhard Euler and philosophy’,
p. 107.
43
Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences,
p. 220.
44
For an account of Herz as Enlightenment
philosopher, see M. L. Davies, Identity or
History? Markus Herz and the End of the
Enlightenment (Detroit, 1995).
45
Cf. Briefe an Aerzte (Berlin, 1777), p. 84;
Grundriß aller medicinischen Wissenschaften
(Berlin, 1782); Versuch über den Schwindel
(Berlin, 1786, 21791); and Grundlage zu den
Vorlesungen über die Experimental-Physik
(Berlin, 1787). On his remarkable career as
physiologist, see C. M. Leder, Die Grenzgänge
des Marcus Herz. Beruf, Haltung und Identität
eines jüdischen Arztes gegen Ende des 18.
Jahrhunderts (Münster/New York, 2007).
46
A modern edition has been published by
E. Conrad et al. (Hamburg, 1990). The impor-
tant Wörterbuch zum leichteren Gebrauch der
Kantischen Schriften, compiled and written by
Karl Christian Erhard Schmid (Jena, 1786 ff.)
does not quote Kant’s ID, but rather Herz’s
Sources and Influences

essay when dealing with the Dissertation. See 1981), p. 14; hereafter cited as NE followed by
further on Herz and the Dissertation the essay page number(s).
‘Until 1781: Responses to Kant’s ‘Inaugural 62
Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, I, 51,
Dissertation’ (1770)’, this volume. Adam & Tannery, vol. VIII, p. 24, translation
47
Kant in a letter to Nicolai dated 25 October from The Philosophical Writings of Descartes,
1773 (Corr-I 142; translation mine). vol. I, trans. Cottingham, Stoothoff, Murdoch
Cf. Kant’s letter to Herz of 7 June 1771 (Corr-I (Cambridge, 1985), p. 210.
123). 63
NSN, G 4: 483, AG:143.
48
Versuch über den Geschmack und die 64
See NSN, G 4: 485, AG: 144.
Ursachen seiner Verschiedenheit (Mitau- 65
See NSN, G 4: 483, AG: 143.
Leipzig, 1776), p. 36; translation mine. 66
NSN, G 4: 484, AG: 143.
49
Cf. Kant’s letter to Herz of 15 October 1790 67
M §56, G 6: 616, AG: 220.
(Corr-II 229). 68
PNG §3, G 6: 599, AG: 207.
50
Cf. the chapter on Herz in E. Watkins (ed.), 69
M §60, G 6: 617, AG: 220.
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Background 70
NE 53.
Source Materials (Cambridge, 2009), ch. 7, 71
NE 54.
which contains translations of the letters as 72
PNG §4, G 6: 600, AG: 208.
well as parts of Betrachtungen (translated as 73
M §19, G 6: 610, AG: 215.
Observations from Speculative Philosophy). 74
PNG §§4–5, G 6: 600–601, AG: 208–209;
51
See further on Maimon the essay ‘First M §§28–30, G 6: 611–612, AG: 216–217.
responses to the Critique of Pure Reason: the 75
M §§31–32, G 6: 612, AG: 217.
1780s and later’, this volume. 76
M §§33–36, G 6: 612–613.
52
Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human 77
See Leibniz’s fourth and fifth letters, G 7: 372,
Understanding, ed. T. L. Beauchamp (Oxford, 393–394, AG: 327–328, 333.
1999), 2.3 (hereafter referred to as EHU). 78
See Leibniz’s third and fourth letters, G 7:
53
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. 363–364, 372, AG: 324–325, 328.
D. Fate Norton, M. J. Norton (Oxford, 2000), 79
See especially the remark to the Amphiboly of
1.1.1.1 (hereafter referred to as T). the Concepts of Reflection (A268ff.=B324ff.)
54
Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles and PE 281ff., 372ff..
of Morals, ed. T. Beauchamp (Oxford, 1998), 80
See R. Pozzo, Georg Friedrich Meiers
Appendix 1.3. Vernunftlehre: eine historisch-systematische
55
See e.g. Principles of Nature and Grace, Based Untersuchung (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 2000).
on Reason (henceforth PNG), §§1–2, origi- 81
See N. Hinske, Zwischen Aufklärung und
nal text in Die philosophischen Schriften von Vernunftkritik: Studien zum Kantschen
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt Logikcorpus (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1998).
(Berlin, 1875–90), vol. 6, p. 598 (hereafter cited 82
Meier, Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre (Halle,
as G, followed by volume and page number[s]); 1752), 26.
translation from G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical 83
LL 530–531; cf. Refl 2702; JL 72, 139.
Essays, trans. R. Ariew, D. Garber (Indianapolis, 84
See R. Pozzo, ‘Prejudices and horizons:
1989), p. 207 (hereafter cited as AG followed by G. F. Meier’s Vernunftlehre and its relation to
page number[s]). Kant’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 43
56
A New System of Nature (henceforth NSN), G (2005): 185–202.
4: 478, AG: 139. 85
see M. Massimi, ‘Kant’s dynamical theory
57
NSN, G 4: 479, AG: 139. of matter in 1755, and its debt to specula-
58
PNG §1–2, G 6: 598, AG: 207; see also NSN, tive Newtonian experimentalism’, Studies
G 4: 479, AG: 139. in History and Philosophy of Science 42,4
59
Monadology (henceforth M) §9, G 6: 608, AG: 214. (2011): 525–543.
60
See e.g. M §1, §36, PNG §§1–3. 86
See M. Stan, ‘Kant’s early theory of motion:
61
New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. metaphysical dynamics and relativity’, The
& ed. P. Remnant, J. Bennett (Cambridge, Leibniz Review 19 (2009): 29–61.

160

87
For an influential defence, see M. Friedman,
Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge,
1992).
88
See D. Warren, ‘Kant on attractive and
repulsive force: the balancing argument’, in
M. Domski, M. Dickson (eds), Discourse on
a New Method. Reinvigorating the Marriage
between History and Philosophy of Science
(Chicago, La Salle, IL, 2010), pp. 193–241.
89
M. Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences
(Cambridge, 1992).
90
See E. Watkins, ‘Kant’s justification of the
laws of mechanics’, Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science 29 (1998): 539–560.
91
See J. G. Schlosser, Platos Briefe (Königsberg,
1795); trans. G. R. Morrow, Plato’s Epistles
(Indianapolis, IN, 1962).
92
J. J. Rousseau, Of the Social Contract, Bk. I, ch. viii.
93
J. J. Rousseau, Of the Social Contract, Bk. I, ch.vii.
94
All of these references are translated by
G. Johnson and G. Magee in G. Johnson (ed.),
Kant on Swedenborg: Dreams of a Spirit-Seer
and Other Writings (West Chester, PA, 2002);
hereafter referred to as Kant on Swedenborg.
95
See G. Johnson, Kant on Swedenborg,
pp. 67–72. See also G. Johnson, ‘A
Commentary on Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-
Seer’, PhD dissertation (Washington, DC,
2001), ch. 2.
96
G. Johnson, Kant on Swedenborg, pp. 73–75.
97
G. Johnson, Kant on Swedenborg, pp. 113.
98
See G. Johnson, ‘Träume eines Geistersehers –
Polemik gegen die Metaphysik oder Parodie
der Popularphilosophie?’, in F. Stengel (ed.),
Kant und Swedenborg. Zugänge zu einem
umstrittenen Verhältnis (Tübingen, 2008),
pp. 99–122 ; hereafter referred to as Kant und
Swedenborg.
99
I summarize the differing interpretations of
DSS in G. Johnson, ‘A Commentary on Kant’s
Dreams of a Spirit-Seer’, ch. 1. For more
recent interpretations, see F. Stengel (ed.),
Kant und Swedenborg.
100
I summarize such arguments in G. Johnson,
‘Did Kant dissemble his interest in
Swedenborg?’, The New Philosophy 102
(1999): 529–560.
101
G. Johnson, Kant on Swedenborg, pp. 83–86.
102
G. Johnson, ‘A Commentary on Kant’s
Dreams of a Spirit-Seer’, ch. 7.
161
Sources and Influences
103
G. Johnson, ‘From Swedenborg’s spirit world
to Kant’s kingdom of ends’, Aries: Journal for
the Study of Western Esotericism 9,1 (2009):
83–99. See also G. Johnson, ‘Swedenborg’s
positive influence on the development of
Kant’s mature moral philosophy’, in S.
McNeilly (ed.), On the True Philosopher and
the True Philosophy: Essays on Swedenborg
(London, 2002), pp. 21–38.
104
See G. Johnson, ‘Kant on Swedenborg in
the Lectures on Metaphysics: the 1760s
and 1770s’, Studia Swedenborgiana 10,1
(1996): 1–38; and ‘Kant on Swedenborg in
the Lectures on Metaphysics: the 1780s and
1790s’, Studia Swedenborgiana 10,2 (1997):
1–26.
105
G. Johnson, Kant on Swedenborg, pp.
108–109.
106
G. Johnson, ‘Kant, Swedenborg, and
Rousseau: The synthesis of Enlightenment
and esotericism in Dreams of a Spirit-
Seer’, in R. Geffarth, M. Meumann,
M. ­Neugebauer-Wölk (eds), Aufklärung und
Esoterik: Wege in die Moderne, forthcoming.
107
First noted in K. Rosenkranz, Geschichte
der Kant’schen Philosophie (Leipzig, 1840),
p. 65.
108
Tetens, Ueber die allgemeine speculativische
Philosophie (Bützow/Wismar, 1775), in Die
philosophischen Werke, ed. H.-J. Engfer, 4
vols. (Hildesheim, 1979–2005), here vol. IV,
p. 18; translations from this work are my
own.
109
Tetens, Ueber die allgemeine speculativische
Philosophie, p. 3.
110
Tetens, Philosophische Versuche über die
menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung,
2 vols. (Leipzig, 1777), in Werke I, p. xxix;
translations from this work are mine. Some
further passages are translated in E. Watkins
(ed.), Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
Background Source Materials (Cambridge,
2009), ch. 9.
111
Tetens, Ueber die allgemeine speculativische
Philosophie, p. 72.
112
Tetens, Ueber die allgemeine speculativische
Philosophie, p. 49.
113
Tetens, Philosophische Versuche über die
menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung,
Werke I, p. iv ff., Werke II, pp. 223–299.
Sources and Influences

114
Tetens, Ueber die allgemeine speculativische 117
17 May 1779; J. G. Hamann, Briefwechsel,
Philosophie, p. 74ff. ed. A. Henkel (Wiesbaden, 1959), vol. 4,
115
Tetens, Philosophische Versuche über die p. 81.
menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung, 118
13 October 1777; J. G. Hamann,
Werke I, pp. 312–327. Briefwechsel, vol. 3, p. 377.
116
Tetens, Ueber die allgemeine speculativische 119
Trans. R. J. Blackwell (Indianapolis,
Philosophie, p. 54n. 1963).

162
 PART III:
KEY THEMES AND TOPICS
 4
KEY THEMES AND TOPICS
This section consists of an A–Z entries list
of key Kantian concepts, which are singled
out for their particular technical usage in
Kant’s theoretical, practical and aesthetic
philosophy and in his anthropology, philos-
ophy of nature and philosophy of religion.
Particularly those concepts and terms are
addressed that are closely associated with
Kant and thus have special significance in
the context of his thought, or underwent
semantic changes in Kant’s philosophi-
cal language. Some of the key concepts are
grouped together under more general topics.
Also the familiar sections of core arguments
in the Critique of Pure Reason are addressed
under their known names, e.g. Analogies of
Experience, Antinomies, Paralogisms, Proofs
of the existence of God etc. Consistency
overall has been sought while respecting
the pluralist interpretive voices across the
entries.
There are also provided here lists of fur-
ther reading that will enable the reader to
undertake further research on all major top-
ics. Given the large number of secondary
texts available on Kant, these are necessar-
ily selective; emphasis has been placed on
the most recent and accessible literature in
English, German and occasionally French. A
more extensive bibliography of the English
165
literature is provided elsewhere in this
Companion.
The aim of this chapter is certainly not
to be exhaustive but to provide the serious
beginning student of Kant and the generally
interested philosopher with the basic vocab-
ulary that is required for an informed study
of Kant’s work. For more advanced scholarly
research, one is advised to consult the three-
volume Kant-Lexikon, edited by G. Mohr, J.
Stolzenberg and M. Willaschek (Berlin/New
York: de Gruyter, 2016). – DS
Abstraction → logic
Aesthetic judgment
Kant’s Critique of the Aesthetic Power of
Judgment, the first part of CJ, has exerted
an enormous influence on modern aesthet-
ics. Yet some of its central claims remain a
matter of controversy and its relation to the
declared intentions of CJ as a whole, as they
are presented in its ‘Introduction’, still seems
to elude perspicuous understanding.
It is useful to distinguish aesthetic judg-
ments into three kinds, according to their
objects. The beauty of works of art is
Key Themes and Topics
dealt with primarily in the discussion of
art and genius (→ art, genius). The aes-
thetic sublime is dealt with in the Analytic
of the Sublime of CJ (→ sublime). Despite
the great importance of these discussions,
Kant’s primary focus seems to be  – this,
though, is a disputed matter – on the beauty
of natural objects, examined in the Analytic
of the Beautiful and the Deduction of Pure
Aesthetic Judgments.
The Analytic presents a four-part defi-
nition of pure judgments of taste: (1) pure
judgments of taste are not cognitive judg-
ments that attribute the objective property
of beauty to an object (→ judgment). They
are subjective expressions of a distinct pleas-
ure. Unlike expressions of sensual enjoyment
or positive moral evaluation, judgments of
beauty express a contemplative disinterested
pleasure (→ interest).
(2) Although pure judgments of taste
are singular and express a subjective pleas-
ure, they lay claim to universal assent. This
reveals that a subject making such judgments
assumes that the mental capacities disinter-
estedly involved in them function in a similar
manner in all other subjects. In this mental
state, the understanding does not apply a
concept to an intuition given in the → imagi-
nation. Rather, the understanding and the
imagination are in a state which Kant char-
acterizes as harmonious free play.
(3) The third moment examines this state
further and describes it as ‘the subjective
purposiveness of representations in the mind
of the beholder, which indicates a certain
purposiveness of the representational state
of the subject, and in this an ease in appre-
hending a given form in the imagination
[. . .]’ (CJ 227). The form of a representation
of the imagination is felt somehow to fit or
be made for the understanding and this state
itself is described as purposive, yet it ‘affords
166
absolutely no cognition [. . .] of the object’
(CJ 228).
(4) Finally, Kant characterizes the univer-
sal assent that judgments of taste demand as
necessary. But the ‘necessity of the universal
assent that is thought in a judgment of taste is
a subjective necessity, which is represented as
objective under the presupposition of a com-
mon sense’ (CJ 239, heading) (→ necessity).
Only on the assumption of a shared sensibil-
ity can a subject say of a judgment that ‘eve-
ryone should agree with it’ (CJ 239).
Two central and perhaps related contro-
versies loom over the Analytic. Aesthetic
pleasure is characterized as the mental state
in which the understanding and the imagi-
nation interact in a state of harmonious
free play. The precise characterization of
this process is a matter of disagreement. On
one interpretation, the understanding moves
freely within a range of concepts that might
be applied to a sensible manifold, without
determining the manifold by means of them.
According to a second interpretation, the
understanding does determine the object of
an aesthetic judgment conceptually, identify-
ing it as the kind of thing it is, yet expresses
the feeling that the object offers a greater
unity or coherence than the application of
these concepts demands. Both interpreta-
tions hold that aesthetic judgments somehow
involve particular conceptual judgments.
Thus, they might be seen as leading to the
thought, often implicit and itself contested,
that there is no essential difference between
judgment of natural beauty and judgment
concerning the beauty of art. For the appreci-
ation of representational art clearly requires
a conceptual ground.
These interpretations of the feeling of
aesthetic pleasure, however, find only scant
textual support. Kant says quite clearly and
often that pure aesthetic judgments please

‘without a concept’ (CJ 219). Indeed, accord-
ing to the prevalent reading, they express a
sense of harmony or fit between a particular
manifold given in the imagination and the
understanding as a faculty. In this relation,
the understanding employs no concepts. A
central consequence of this interpretation is
that judgments of beauty in nature and art
are different in kind.
In the ‘Introduction’ to CJ, Kant claims
that the assumption of the purposiveness of
nature is a subjective condition of experi-
ence: ‘The power of judgment thus also has
in itself an a priori principle for the possi-
bility of nature, though only in a subjective
respect, by means of which it prescribes a
law, not to nature (as autonomy), but to itself
(as heautonomy) for reflection on nature.’
(CJ 185–186)
Remarkably, a distinction is drawn
between two types of reflective judgment
that presuppose the teleological or concep-
tual purposiveness of nature and its aesthetic
purposiveness respectively (CJ 188–194)
(→ teleology). This raises the question of
whether the aesthetic pleasure of feeling that
certain sensible manifolds apprehended by
the imagination are somehow purposive for
the understanding is a subjective condition of
experience. Is this why a critique of aesthetic
judgment is an essential part of the Critical
project?
Perhaps it is Kant’s view that at the most
fundamental, pre-conceptual level it is aes-
thetically pleasing spatial (or temporal) forms
that we make into objects. It is pure judgments
of taste that carve objects out of the manifold
given in intuition. Furthermore, this aesthetic
delineation of objects makes possible a first
sorting of them into similarly shaped objects
and so an account of our grasp of natural
kinds. This suggestion finds confirmation
in the discussion of the notion of a ‘normal
167
Key Themes and Topics
idea’, the spatial shape that would result if
we were to superimpose a large number of
members of a kind: ‘This normal idea is not
derived from the proportions taken from
experience, as determinate rules; rather, it is
in accordance with it that rules for judging
first become possible. It is the image for the
whole species [. . .].’ (CJ 234)
The assumption of the aesthetic purpo-
siveness of nature is then the assumption
that the sensible manifolds that we find aes-
thetically pleasing will prove amenable to
conceptual investigation. If this is right, then
aesthetic judgment is a necessary condition
of → experience and → knowledge, because
it is the ‘subjective condition of cognizing’
(CJ 238) and the assumption of a common
sense is a ‘necessary condition of the univer-
sal communicability of our cognition’ (CJ
239). Without the assumption that nature
is aesthetically purposive the ‘understanding
could not find itself in it’ (CJ 193).
In the Dialectic of the Aesthetic Power of
Judgment, Kant appears to draw metaphysi-
cal conclusions from his analysis of judg-
ments of natural beauty. The conflict between
their demand for universal assent and their
subjective and non-conceptual character is
resolved by pointing to the idea of the aes-
thetic purposiveness of nature, which Kant
here refers to as the ‘supersensible substra-
tum of humanity’ (CJ 340). – IG
Further Reading
H. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A
Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
H. Ginsborg, ‘Lawfulness without a law:
Kant on the free play of imagination and
understanding’, Philosophical Studies 25
(1997): 37–81.
Key Themes and Topics
P. Guyer, ‘Kant’s ambitions in the third
Critique’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Kant and
Modern Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006),
pp. 538–587.
Amphiboly
In → Aristotle, an amphiboly is a logical fal-
lacy caused by the ambiguity of an expres-
sion. In the section ‘On the Amphiboly of
the Concepts of Reflection’ in CPR (A260–
A292=B316–349), Kant offers an account
of how the main points in → Leibniz’s meta-
physical system arise from a transcendental
amphiboly. This is the fallacy of confusing
appearances with objects of the pure under-
standing or noumena. The neglect to distin-
guish between them results from overlooking
the distinction between two sources of cogni-
tion, sensibility and understanding. Leibniz
thus treats all objects as noumena, which can
be accounted for by purely conceptual means.
The cause of transcendental amphiboly is
the neglect of transcendental reflection. In
general → logic, reflection is the comparison
of concepts. For logic, the source of a → rep-
resentation, i.e. the question of which faculty
it belongs to, is of no importance. By con-
trast, the task of transcendental reflection is
to determine the cognitive source to which
representations (and judgments based on
them) belong, that is, whether they belong to
the understanding or to sensibility. To thus
determine the topos (place) of a putative
cognition is a prerequisite for making philo-
sophical claims. It is therefore a basic aspect
of → critique (A263=B319).
For this purpose concepts of reflec-
tion are used. These consist of four pairs
168
(corresponding to the four titles in the Table
of Judgment): → identity and difference;
agreement and opposition; the inner and the
outer; and matter and → form. The concepts
of reflection differ from categories in that
categories determine objects (→ deduction),
whereas reflection merely serves the initial
task of finding the topos for a concept.
Kant examines the main points in Leibniz’
metaphysics from the vantage point of the
concepts of reflection. He attempts to show
that Leibniz reached his results through a
transcendental amphiboly. Leibniz, who ‘intel-
lectualized’ the appearances (A271=B327),
admits no role for sensibility, which he inter-
prets as confused cognition.
Since he does not distinguish between the
sources of cognition, Leibniz’s reflection is
merely logical. With respect to the first pair
of reflective concepts (identity/difference),
this leads to a metaphysical application of
the principle of identity of indiscernibles.
For concepts, the principle is valid, that is,
if two concepts have the same internal deter-
mination, then they are identical. However,
due to the amphiboly, Leibniz neglects dif-
ferences that stem from sensibility. Space
(→ Transcendental Aesthetic) enables two
conceptually identical objects to exist at
different places, so Leibniz’s principle is
invalid if taken as a law for appearances
(A272=B328).
Reflecting on agreement and opposition,
as applied to concepts, leads to the doctrine
that reality is entirely positive and contains
no opposition. But in the experienced world
of appearances there exists real opposition,
such as opposed forces. Kant also traces the
rationalist belief that evil is mere privation to
this confusion of appearances and objects of
the understanding (noumena) (A273=B329).
As for the inner and the outer, objects of
the understanding must have something

inner which is independent of outer relations.
This leads Leibniz to model his monads on
our inner state, ascribing representations to
them. Monads, as pure interiorities, must
also lack real influence on each other, and be
uni­ted only by means of predetermined har­
mony (A274–275=B330–331). Transcendental
reflection, on the other hand, shows that a
substance in space contains nothing abso-
lutely internal, but consists in mere relations,
due to the structure of space as a form of →
intuition (B340=A284).
The relation between matter and form,
finally, is reversed due to the amphiboly.
For noumena, there must be matter for
there to be form, and thus Leibniz assumes
substances as ground for all possibility.
As regards appearances, however, form
precedes matter, since forms of intuition
make possible the experience of objects
(A267–268=B323–324). – MQ
Further Reading
M. Fichant, ‘L’Amphibologie des concepts
de la réflexion: la fin de l’ontologie’, in
V. Rohden et al. (eds), Recht und Frieden
in der Philosophie Kants. Akten des X.
Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, Band
1 (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2008),
pp. 71–93.
S. Heßbrüggen-Walter, ‘Topik, Reflexion
und Vorurteilskritik: Kants Amphibolie
der Reflexionsbegriffe im Kontext’,
Archiv fūr Geschichte der Philosophie 86
(2004): 146–175.
M. Willaschek, ‘Phaenomena/Noumena und
die Amphibolie der Reflexionsbegriffe’,
in G. Mohr, M. Willaschek (eds),
Immanuel Kant. Kritik der reinen
Vernunft, in the series Klassiker auslegen
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998),
pp. 325–351.
169
Key Themes and Topics
Analogy
Kant talks of analogy in at least two ways.
(1) There is the sense, common in the early
modern logical tradition, in which analogy is
characterized along with induction as an epis-
temically weaker form of inference, whereby
one attempts to infer ‘from the particular to
the universal’ (LL 287), and whose conclu-
sions can never achieve a status of strict apo-
dictic universality (→ necessity). Whereas an
inductive inference postulates a single prop-
erty of some observed objects to the entire set
of those objects, analogical inferences postu-
late that insofar as two objects share some
properties, those two objects share all their
properties (LL 287).
Analogy is used in (2) a more developed
sense in the Critical period, which follows
the example of mathematical ratios in geo-
metrical construction, i.e. a:b :: c:x. As
regards mathematical ratios, Kant argues
that ‘if two members of the proportion are
given the third is also thereby given, i.e., can
be constructed’ (A179=B222).
In philosophical analogies, in contrast,
only ‘the relation to this fourth member,
but not this fourth member itself’ (A179–
180=B222) can be given or constructed. The
allusion seems to be that analogy cannot be
used to secure determinate → knowledge,
such as the specific value of x, but can vali-
date more indeterminate inferences, such as
that given knowledge of a, b and the relation
between them, we can infer from a given c
that there must be a similar relation to an x,
even though x is not (and perhaps could not)
be an object of knowledge.
This model of analogy is used on different
levels in the Critical system. While the prin-
ciples of understanding are appropriately
characterized as analogies, so too are the
inferences that extend beyond the limits of
Key Themes and Topics
possible → experience. Here, Kant suggests
that characterization of the sphere beyond
human experience can proceed through a
process of ‘symbolic anthropomorphism’
(P 357). Such an inference takes the relation
between known objects and posits it as exist-
ing between the sphere of possible experience
and the sphere beyond possible experience.
The form of analogical inference finds a
role throughout the Critical system, whether
in regard to the characterization of the divine
(P 357) (→ proofs of the existence of God),
the understanding of the free will of human
beings (CPrR 55–57) (→ freedom) or the
purposiveness of nature which can only be
characterized through the process of anal-
ogy, in comparison with the practice of the
human artist (FI 240) (→ teleology). – JC
Analogies of Experience
In ID, Kant asks for an explanation of ‘how
it is possible that a plurality of substances
should be in mutual interaction with each
other, and in this way belong to the same
whole, which is called a world’ (ID 407). This
explanation is provided within the Critical
system in the sections of CPR detailed as the
Analogies of Experience.
The Analogies of Experience are the set
of the principles of the understanding corre-
sponding to the third class in the Table of the
Categories, that of relation (A80=B106) (→
deduction). The categories under the heading
of relation themselves correspond to the cat-
egorical, hypothetical and disjunctive forms
of → judgment. Thus the principle of causal-
ity, for example, as discussed in the second
analogy, is to be understood as the schema-
tized application of the category of cause,
which is an analogue of the hypothetical
170
form of judgment. Thus, the principles of
the understanding ‘are nothing other than
rules of the objective use of the categories’
(A161=B200).
As with all the principles however, the
application of the schematized categories is
discovered by way of argumentation to be a
necessary and objective condition of the pos-
sibility of coherent → experience, and not
merely a subjective employment of a concept.
As Kant notes in P (P 258–259), the applica-
tion of the concept of cause could be justified
on the grounds of pragmatic expedience or
perhaps even indispensability, but the genu-
ine source of its objective validity is its role as
a transcendental condition of experience.
Kant states that the general principle of
the Analogies is that ‘[e]xperience is possible
only through the representation of a necessary
connection of perceptions’ (A176=B218).
As such, each of the Analogies concerns the
manner in which the connection of represen-
tations within our experience is represented
as manifesting a necessary connection. Since
the schematized categories are nothing but
the representation of temporal relations
within the manifold of representations, the
Analogies can be understood as detailing the
sense in which temporal representation man-
ifests different forms of necessary connection
between our perceptions.
The result that Kant aims for is to dem-
onstrate how a traditional metaphysical pic-
ture of the physical world as a community of
causally interacting substances undergoing
change within a spatiotemporal continuum
can be articulated solely within the Critical
vocabulary of necessary connection within
the temporal order of representation.
A central claim that seems to play a role
in the argument for each of the Analogies
is that time itself cannot be perceived (e.g.
B225, A192=B237, B257). Whereas time is,

as argued in the → Transcendental Aesthetic,
a fundamental representation within which
all representation of objects takes place, it
does not therefore present itself as a distinct
object of perception. Thus, Kant will claim
that the representation of the modes of time,
i.e. the various temporal relations that mani-
fest themselves in experience, can only take
place via our representation of objects as
they appear in time.
Kant states that the Analogies are to be
understood as ‘dynamical’ principles of the
understanding, which he states are concerned
with the ‘existence of an appearance in gen-
eral’ (A160=B199). Dynamical principles
are in one sense inferior to what Kant calls
‘mathematical’ principles (represented by the
→ Axioms of Intuition and → Anticipations
of Perception) in that while the latter are
‘unconditionally necessary’, dynamical prin-
ciples on the other hand are necessary ‘only
under the condition of empirical thinking in
an experience’ (A160=B199).
However, this restriction does not render
the dynamical principles any less epis-
temically secure with regard to experience
(A160=B200). While mathematical (or ‘con-
stitutive’) principles serve to determine par-
ticular characteristics of related perceptions,
dynamical principles – which Kant later char-
acterizes as equivalent to a description of the
dynamical principles as having a ‘regulative’
function  – do not characterize the appear-
ances themselves (e.g. in terms of extensive
or intensive magnitude); rather, they concern
relations between appearances which deter-
mine that, given a particular perception, there
must be a relation to another existing percep-
tion that can be characterized in accordance
with the modes of time (A179=B222).
The principle of the First Analogy (in the
B-edition version) is as follows: ‘In all change
of appearances substance persists, and its
171
Key Themes and Topics
quantum is neither increased nor diminished
in nature.’ (B224) This section presents the
case that time itself functions as the unchang-
ing substratum within which all change, con-
sidered as a temporal relation manifested
between objects, is represented.
The traditional metaphysical demand artic-
ulated by the concept of substance is, Kant
claims, ‘the substratum of everything real’
(B225) and this demand can be satisfied by
the role of time itself in the representation of
an objective manifold for the possibility of
coherent experience. The second clause of the
principle, regarding the quantum of substance,
is thought to follow from the preceding claim,
whereby if time itself is unchanging, and time
itself provides the role of substance, then since
a diminution or increase in substance would
entail a change in time itself, no such diminu-
tion or increase can occur.
The principle of the Second Analogy (again
in the B-edition version) is that ‘[a]ll altera-
tions occur in accordance with the law of the
connection of cause and effect’ (B232). Kant
argues that the mere apprehension of two
perceptions in a certain temporal order fails
by itself to determine whether that temporal
order is a result of it representing a genu-
ine relation between the object(s) of those
perceptions, or whether the order is a mere
result of the order of the apprehensions of the
perceiver – thus the order of the perceptions
in mere consciousness is insufficient to deter-
mine whether that order represents an objec-
tive or subjective relation of the appearances.
Kant claims that the grasping of the con-
scious order as an objective relation must then
result from the subject’s contribution of the
concept of cause, which demands that those
perceptions be represented as manifesting a
necessary and lawful relation, rather than a
merely contingent association. Furthermore,
without such a contribution, Kant holds that
Key Themes and Topics
the manifold of appearance would fail to
manifest the minimal order that allows for the
coherence of experience itself (A188=B234).
The principle of the Third Analogy (in
the B-version) states that ‘[a]ll substances,
insofar as they can be perceived in space as
simultaneous, are in thoroughgoing interac-
tion’ (B256). Simultaneity is defined by Kant
as ‘the existence of the manifold at the same
time’ (B257). The strategy of argumentation
is broadly similar to that for the preceding
analogies. From the mere subjective order of
the manifestation of representations in our
consciousness, we cannot infer the objective
relation of those appearances as simultane-
ous, any more than we can infer their neces-
sary succession, as in the Second Analogy.
Kant argues, then, that it must be the case
that the concept of the reciprocal sequence
of the perceptions (such that a reversal of the
subjective time-order would not misrepresent
the objective relation between them) must be
applied so that the very notion of simultane-
ity, and thus the coherence of our experience,
be possible (B258).
Together these principles secure the pic-
ture of empirical nature as a unified contin-
uum of existing things ordered by necessary
rules, i.e. undergoing law-like governance.
The Analogies are taken by Kant to provide
metaphysical foundations for the consolida-
tion of Newtonian laws of mechanics (→
laws (of nature)/lawfulness, Newton). In
MFNS, Kant takes the Analogies to provide
a basis in general metaphysics for the first,
second and third laws of mechanics (MFNS
541–553) (→ natural science). – JC
Further Reading
S. M. Bayne, Kant on Causation. On the
Fivefold Routes to the Principle of
Causation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004).
172
A. Melnick, ‘Kant’s proofs of substance
and causation’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Kant and
Modern Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006),
pp. 203–237.
S. Rödl, Kategorien des Zeitlichen
(Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 2005), esp.
chs 4 and 5.
B. Thöle, ‘Die Analogien der Erfahrung’, in
G. Mohr, M. Willaschek (eds), Immanuel
Kant. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in
the series Klassiker Auslegen (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 1998), pp. 267–296.
E. Watkins, ‘The System of Principles’,
in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Kant’s ‘Critique of
Pure Reason’ (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), pp. 151–167.
Analysis (analytic)
Kant conceives of analysis in terms of the
decomposition of a whole into its parts,
although it also has the sense of a regress from
consequence to ground (ID 388). The former
sense can be seen in his accounts of conceptual
analysis and of analytic → judgment in terms
of concept-containment. In analyzing the pred-
icate concept, its conceptual parts (or marks)
are found to be parts also of the subject con-
cept in an analytic judgment (A6–7=B10–11).
Analysis in the latter sense is found in the
characterization of the ‘analytic method’ as
‘regressive’, going from a given cognition to
its conditions (P 276) (→ method).
Analysis consists in seeking out the marks
of a concept (LL 757). Concepts are conceived
of as conjunctions of conceptual marks, and
by analyzing a concept one becomes con-
scious of the marks already thought in the

concept (in that these marks become clear),
which leads to the concept becoming distinct
(cf. JL 34). If by analysis we were to discover
all marks thought in a concept (including the
marks of the marks), then we would have a
complete definition of the concept. But ‘the
exhaustiveness of the analysis of my con-
cept is always doubtful’ (A728=B756), hence
analyses will result in expositions rather than
in strict definitions. In an exposition, a prag-
matically sufficient number (though not all)
of a concept’s marks are given. Definitions
and expositions are expressed in analytic
judgments, since the marks in the predicate
are found through analysis of the subject
concept. Analytic judgments are thus called
‘judgments of clarification’ (A7=B11).
In the 1760s, Kant came close to equat-
ing philosophy with conceptual analysis. At
this point, he contrasts the synthetic method
of mathematics with the analytic method of
metaphysics: whereas mathematics arbitrar-
ily defines its concepts, metaphysics starts
from given concepts that have to be analyzed.
This can be most difficult, as some concepts
‘are scarcely capable of analysis at all’ (Inq
280). In his Critical philosophy, Kant retains
some of his earlier views on mathematics
and conceptual analysis, but a major revi-
sion takes place in his conception of philo-
sophical method. Analyzing ‘the concepts
that inhabit our reason a priori, is not the end
[. . .] but only a preparation for metaphysics
proper, namely extending its a priori cogni-
tion synthetically, and it is useless for this end,
because it merely shows what is contained
in these concepts’ (B23). The primacy of →
synthesis is also shown in Kant’s claim that,
even though they seem to be opposite actions,
analysis always presupposes synthesis, ‘for
where the understanding has not previously
combined anything, neither can it dissolve
anything’ (B130). Kant thus holds that the
173
Key Themes and Topics
synthetic unity of → apperception is ‘the high-
est point’ of the understanding, presupposed
by the analytic unity of consciousness (B134).
In line with this, Kant thinks it much more
important to analyze ‘the faculty of under-
standing itself, in order to research the pos-
sibility of a priori concepts’ (A65=B90) than
to analyze concepts in order to make them
distinct. The former kind of analysis, called
the Analytic of Concepts, is the task of →
transcendental philosophy; its aim is to find
the pure concepts of the understanding (A65–
66=B90–91) (→ deduction). The Analytic
of Concepts is followed by the Analytic of
Principles, which gives the rules for applying
the categories to appearances (A132=B171)
(→ Analogies of Experience, Anticipations of
Perception, Axioms of Intuition).
Kant’s practical philosophy also contains
an analytic. As practical reason does not con-
cern the cognition of objects, but ‘its own abil-
ity to make them real’, its analytic proceeds in
reversed order compared to that of theoreti-
cal reason (taken in a wide sense as including
the Transcendental Aesthetic) (CPrR 89–90).
Whereas the latter went from intuition via
concepts to principles, the analytic of practi-
cal reason begins with the pure law.
In CJ, there is an Analytic of the Beautiful,
an Analytic of the Sublime and an Analytic
of the Teleological Power of Judgment,
treating of these respective aspects of the
reflecting power of judgment (→ aesthetic
judgment). – MQ
Analytic judgment → judgment
Anthropology
Anthropology, understood as the empiri-
cal study of human beings, forms part of
Key Themes and Topics
several of Kant’s works, e.g. his essays on
history (CBH, End, UH), MM, especially the
Doctrine of Virtue, and R. It is however sys-
tematically treated in Anthr, which is based
on Kant’s lectures on anthropology (LA), a
very popular topic Kant taught for over 20
years. Yet, when Anthr first appeared, it was
criticized for being unsystematic, for creat-
ing a profound problem for the coherence of
Kant’s moral philosophy and for the trivial-
ity of its observations. Assessing the sound-
ness of these criticisms offers a useful way
into this deceptively readable book.
In terms of Kant’s overall philosophical
project, the question ‘What is the human
being?’ is a central one, so it is not surprising
that Kant dedicates a volume to the subject.
Alongside his lectures on anthropology, Kant
offered lectures on physical geography (PG),
a portion of which was devoted to the study
of human beings as natural creatures in their
natural environment.
But this is not the point of view of Anthr,
which is ‘pragmatic’. In G, the term ‘prag-
matic’ is defined in contrast to ‘technical’,
which refers to instrumental efficacy, and
to ‘moral’; ‘pragmatic’ refers to individual
well-being and prudential planning for gen-
eral welfare (G 416–417). Also in G, Kant
announces the need for a practical anthro-
pology, in the sense of casuistry, that is, of
showing how his moral philosophy applies to
particular cases (cf. G 412). Yet in his intro-
duction to Anthr, he appears to revise these
distinctions, linking the term ‘pragmatic’
with moral ends and discussing the empirical
conditions of moral development, namely the
‘investigation of what [the human being] as
a free-acting being makes of himself, or can
and should make of himself’ (Anthr 119).
The book, then, helps to flesh out the
moral commitments we have as rational
and free creatures, addressing important
174
issues concerning character, the moral role of
human society, the formation of dispositions
to act in certain ways, the empirical expres-
sion of moral personality and more gener-
ally the cultivation of psychological and
social features that promote or facilitate the
achievement of our moral vocation.
If the pragmatic perspective can be vindi-
cated in terms of the overall architectonic of
Kant’s philosophy, a profound puzzle remains
about the precise bearing of anthropological
observations upon morality. These observa-
tions are drawn from a variety of sources,
from personal experience of one’s own past
behaviour as well as that of others, travel
books, memoirs and novels, and also, as
regards national character and language. The
behaviours, customs and habits Kant records
and comments upon show how natural needs
and traits are manifested and developed in
different cultural contexts, mainly of course
the contexts with which Kant was more
immediately acquainted.
The overarching aim is to show how human
beings can overcome their natural egoism,
which can be aggravated in certain contexts,
and cultivate human fellowship or ‘plural-
ism’, a ‘way of thinking in which one is not
concerned with oneself as the whole world,
but rather regards and conducts oneself as a
mere citizen of the world’ (Anthr 130).
The puzzle is to reconcile this empirical
side with central tenets of Kant’s moral phi-
losophy (→ morality), namely that human
beings may assert their transcendental →
freedom, that is, the freedom from all empiri-
cal determination of their actions; that they
ought to act autonomously, not as a result of
received opinions, maxims, and such exter-
nal influences, but only out of respect for the
moral law (→ categorical imperative); and
finally, that they can transform their moral
personality by a ‘change of heart’, which

differs from a change in practice that takes
place ‘little by little’ (R 47).
Nevertheless, Kant also argues for the
importance of the moral development of the
empirical self both at the individual level and
as regards society as a whole. So he clearly
believes that a coherent account can be given
that binds together pragmatic aims, broadly
understood, and moral aims.
How Anthr is interpreted, then, depends
on how the relation between the empirical
and the noumenal self is treated in Kant’s
other works as well. The empirical Kant
proved awkward for some of his contem-
poraries and was virtually ignored by sub-
sequent scholars. Some recent work on the
topic has opened up interesting interpretative
and philosophical possibilities for integrating
anthropological concerns into Kantian moral
philosophy.
The charge of triviality resonates less
with contemporary audiences, for whom
the material, with its wide range of refer-
ences (from Virgil to Voltaire), offers an
interesting view of a historical period popu-
lated by characters some of whom are more
enduring and recognizable than others. The
charge levelled against Kant nowadays is
that he promotes negative stereotypes of
women and of non-white races. Some of the
descriptive material on women is dated like
all observations of this kind. Moral develop-
ment regards women equally as all human
beings without exception. What is different
are the circumstances, roles and gender char-
acteristics that facilitate, colour or impede
this overarching aim.
When Kant turns to national character, his
aim is to emphasize negative traits because
he believes criticism helps us improve our-
selves. So, for example, we find that the
English are rude, and that the Spaniards
resist reform and so forth. It is in his lectures
175
Key Themes and Topics
on geography that Kant uses race in a biolog-
ical sense, while making disparaging remarks
about non-white races (PG 316). At the same
time, he holds that all human beings have
common descent and form ‘one family’ (Refl
1499) and that race diversity is down to envi-
ronmental factors.
In Anthr, Kant’s concern is the entire
human race and its common vocation, which
is to shape its own character and perfect
itself, so that ‘the human being, as an animal
endowed with the capacity of reason (ani-
mal rationabile), can make out of himself a
rational animal (animal rationale)’ (Anthr
321). – KD
Further Reading
P. Frierson, Freedom and Anthropology in
Kant’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
B. Jacobs, P. Kain (eds), Essays on Kant’s
Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
R. Louden, ‘Applying Kant’s ethics: the
role of anthropology’, in G. Bird (ed.),
A Companion to Kant (Malden, MA/
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010),
pp. 350–363.
H. Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology.
Its Origin, Meaning, and Critical
Significance (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
2006).
Anticipations of Perception
All of the categories are a priori concepts
which serve as predicates in the synthetic a
priori judgments or principles that deter-
mine the conditions for the possibility of
experience of objects. So also the categories
Key Themes and Topics
of quality, which are ‘reality’, ‘negation’ and
‘limitation’, and whose application in con-
creto are expounded in the Anticipations of
Perception.
In conformity with the role of the catego-
ries of quality, which is to establish the refer-
ence to a possible → object, the Anticipations
of Perception are concerned with the prin-
ciple of a priori cognition of the ‘matter of
perception’, viz. ‘sensation’ (B208=A167),
and hence the application of the categories
of quality to perceptions so as to establish
their objective reality.
Of course, as Kant notes, it is impossible
to anticipate a priori precisely that which can
only be encountered in a posteriori → experi-
ence, viz. the matter of experience, but Kant
argues that it is possible to determine that
‘there is something which can be cognized
a priori in every sensation, as sensation
in general (without a particular one being
given)’ (A167=B209).
According to Kant’s theory, ‘percep-
tion is empirical consciousness, i.e., one in
which there is at the same time sensation’.
The objects of perception, appearances, do
not only have an a priori side to them (pure
spatiotemporal form) (→ Transcendental
Aesthetic), but must also have a material
component, namely ‘the real’ which affects
the subject who is conscious of the object.
This ‘real’ corresponds to the sensations
in the subject (B209=A168), which in fact
constitute the material aspect of a subject’s
empirical consciousness.
Therefore, the principle which anticipates
empirical perception asserts that ‘[i]n all
appearances the sensation, and the real, which
corresponds to it in the object (realitas phe-
nomenon), has an intensive magnitude, i.e.,
a degree’ (A166). Since sensation is instan-
taneous, its apprehension does not rest on a
successive synthesis, as with homogeneous
176
quanta such as space and time, and is there-
fore not an extensive magnitude. But like the
extensive magnitudes space and time, percep-
tion is also a ‘continuous’ or ‘flowing’ mag-
nitude (B211=A170), for ‘between reality in
appearance and negation there is a continu-
ous nexus of many possible intermediate sen-
sations’ (A168=B210; cf. A143=B182–183).
The degree of consciousness in a multiplic-
ity of perceptions can gradually increase or
decrease until an approximation of zero (an
actual zero degree of consciousness would
mean the absence or negation of sensation,
corresponding to the category of ‘negation’).
Sensation in perception is a merely sub-
jective representation, but since sensation
is connected to the real, any determination
of the intensive magnitude of sensation is a
determination of the empirical → reality of
the object of perception, to which the sensa-
tion corresponds. Notice, however, that what
is determined as real is that which is repre-
sented by a concept of reality, in fact ‘a pure
concept of the understanding’ (B182=A143),
and ‘does not signify anything except the
synthesis in an empirical consciousness in
general’ (A175=B217).
Importantly, Kant notes that if ‘all reality
in perception has a degree, between which
and negation there is an infinite gradation
of ever lesser degrees’, then it is impossi-
ble to have an experience which proves ‘an
entire absence of everything real in appear-
ance, i.e., a proof of empty space or of empty
time’ (A172=B214). The fact that ‘the entire
absence of the real in sensible intuition can-
not itself be perceived’ (ibid.) is important for
showing that the standard assumption of nat-
ural philosophers ‘that the real in space [. . .]
is everywhere one and the same, and can be
differentiated only according to its extensive
magnitude’ (A173=B215), which leads them
to think that only assuming that volume ‘is

empty in all matter’ can explain differences ‘in
the quantity of various kinds of matter in bod-
ies that have the same volume’ (trans. Kemp
Smith), is ‘merely metaphysical’ and thus mis-
taken in Kant’s view (ibid.). These differences
can be accounted for because of the differ-
ences in intensive magnitude.
More generally, given the fact that Kant
connects the anticipation of sensation in
general to empirical consciousness in inner
sense (A175–176=B217–218) doubts can
be raised as to the possibility of being liter-
ally unconscious (in a first-order sense of
consciousness), amounting to a negation=0
of the intensive magnitude of the quality of
sensation, since no ‘being’ or ‘real’ would a
fortiori correspond to zero degree of empiri-
cal consciousness in perception (cf. B414). In
P, Kant observes that ‘total unconsciousness’
is in actual fact always ‘psychological dark-
ness’, which should rather ‘be regarded as a
consciousness that is merely outweighed by
another, stronger one’ (P 307). This is impor-
tant for assessing Kant’s views regarding the
existence of first-order consciousness in rela-
tion to transcendental self-consciousness (→
apperception). – DS
Further Reading
B. Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to
Judge (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1998), ch. 10.
Antinomies
The faculty of → reason seeks the uncon-
ditioned for any conditioned knowledge
(A409=B436). In the case of the appearances
of outer sense (→ inner/outer sense), this
leads it to posit the existence of the totality
177
Key Themes and Topics
of conditions that defines the completeness
of the world (A408=B434), which is the
topic of rational cosmology. This, however,
issues in apparently mutually contradictory
statements: this is the Antinomy of Pure
Reason (A407=B433). In the Antinomy,
reason’s search for the unconditioned is
defined in terms of ascending series moving
from conditioned to that which conditions it
(A410–411=B437–438).
The Antinomy takes on different forms
depending upon the nature of this regress.
Kant identifies four antinomies correspond-
ing to the groups of categories: there are thus
two mathematical and two dynamical anti-
nomies. For each antinomy, Kant presents a
thesis and an antithesis, as well as proofs of
these claims that should not rely upon the
results of the → Transcendental Aesthetic or
the Transcendental Analytic (→ deduction,
Analogies of Experience).
These claims are so structured that the
thesis locates the unconditioned ground in
the world: it is dogmatic and broadly in line
with the tradition of rationalist → metaphys-
ics. The antithesis understands this ground in
terms of the infinite totality of all the condi-
tions: it is empiricist (A465–466=B493–494).
(1) In the First Antinomy (A426–
433=B454–461), series of appearances are
generated spatially by identifying larger
regions conditioning a given region of space
by containing it, or in time by identifying a
previous time as conditioning the present one.
The antinomy leads (A426–427=B454–456)
to identifying a spatial boundary, or a first
time (thesis), or on the contrary to the claim
that the world is unlimited in space or time
(antithesis).
(2) Instead of a regress in space or time,
the parts of an object can be taken as condi-
tions of the whole (Second Antinomy, A434–
443=B462–471). This mereological series
Key Themes and Topics
leads (A434–435=B462–463) to identifying
ultimate parts (thesis) or, on the contrary,
claiming infinite divisibility (antithesis).
(3) One can identify a chain of causes for
any given event (Third Antinomy, A444–
451=B472–479). The thesis claims that there
exists a non-natural causality that defines
first causes of natural occurrences (A444–
445=B472–473). The antithesis denies this,
which means that the causal series is infinite
(ibid.).
(4) Finally, one can seek that which is
necessary for the existence of an appearance
(Fourth Antinomy, A452–460=B480–488).
The thesis argues for an absolutely necessary
being that grounds all contingent appear-
ances. The antithesis denies that there is any-
thing else than an infinite series of contingent
existential conditions which act as such a
ground (A452–453=B480–481).
The apparent incompatibility of these
pairs of thesis and antithesis shows that there
is a problem with the speculations of rational
cosmology. Kant provides an interpretation
of the nature of the problem, a diagnosis of
how it arises, and a solution to it. Kant inter-
prets the Antinomy of Pure Reason in terms
of a conflict of the faculties of reason and the
understanding (A422=B450).
The antitheses are grounded in principles
of the pure understanding, which are applied
to the syntheses of the totality of the condi-
tioned. This leads these antitheses to defin-
ing the unconditioned in terms of infinite
regresses: a first cause (Third Antinomy),
respectively a smallest part (Second
Antinomy), for instance, cannot form part of
the world of appearances. This follows from
their incompatibility with the Second Analogy
(→ Analogies of Experience), respectively the
→ Anticipations of Perception. The theses
give precedence to the principle of reason
according to which the totality of conditions
178
is given. This leads to defining the uncon-
ditioned in terms of an object in the world,
which has to be finite to be cognizable.
Kant’s diagnosis is that, in each case, both
thesis and antithesis rely upon the totality of
the series of appearances (finite in the thesis,
and infinite in the antithesis) being given inde-
pendently of our cognition. This is the nature
of the transcendental illusion (→ Dialectic)
that underpins both the theses and antitheses
of the antinomies (A505–506=B533–534).
This illusion is ultimately caused by reason’s
search for the unconditioned. It arises, how-
ever, because of the failure to distinguish
between a condition’s being given and its
defining a task for our cognition.
Kant’s Critical move is to ask about the
possibility of such an unconditioned totality
of conditions: he points out that it cannot be
met with in space and time (A508=B536).
The principle of reason according to which
the totality of conditions is given does not,
therefore, have a constitutive role for our
experience: it is merely regulative (→ regula-
tive principles).
The resolution of the antinomies then pro-
ceeds differently in the mathematical and the
dynamical cases. In the first case, the total-
ity of conditions defines an object, which is
viewed as existing in itself (A504=B532). This
is the world, identified by composition, in the
First Antinomy, and the ultimate constituents
of reality, identified by division, in the sec-
ond. But this object is defined through a ‘syn-
thesis of homogeneous things’ (A530=B558)
in appearance, and does not define a thing in
itself. As a result, the theses and antitheses
of the first and second antinomies do not
represent a contradiction, but a dialectical
opposition (A504=B532), because both deal
with an object which is mistakenly taken as
given in itself. The theses and antitheses are
thus both false.

In the case of the dynamical antinomies,
the regresses in the theses lead to an uncondi-
tioned that is heterogeneous with the series,
while the antitheses deny the existence of
this heterogeneous term (A529–530=B557–
558). As Kant indicates, ‘the case can be
mediated to the satisfaction of both parties’
(A530=B558). Indeed, Kant can make use of
the distinction between two perspectives, an
empirical one (in the realm of appearances),
and an intelligible one (in the realm of the
in-itself), to allow a regress from the one per-
spective to lead to an unconditional condi-
tion (thesis), while from the other perspective
the unconditional totality is the infinite series
generated by the regress (antithesis).
The important Third Antinomy is thus
resolved by a distinction between the intelli-
gible point of view from which there is a non-
natural causality defining first causes in the
natural world, and the empirical one which
admits of no other causality than that of nature
(A530–537=B558–565): this defines Kant’s
solution to the free will/determinism problem
(A538–557=B566–585) (→ freedom). The
thesis and antithesis of the third and fourth
antinomies are therefore both true, once their
scope has been specified appropriately.
In the case of the mathematical antinomies,
Kant makes an additional claim that leads to
a conclusion that is of central importance to
his whole enterprise in CPR. He claims that
transcendental realism (TR) is not able to
provide a resolution of the first and second
antinomies. The problem for the transcen-
dental realist is that he is faced with two pos-
sible options in each case, and that one of
them must be true, because (1) they exhaust
the list of possibilities for the determination
in terms of the particular property at stake
(boundedness or divisibility), (2) they are
mutually exclusive, and (3) indeterminacy is
not an available option.
179
Key Themes and Topics
The latter point is key here, and is a direct
consequence of the fact that the world of
objects is already given as fully determined
for the transcendental realist. Insofar as the
alternative to TR is the Critical perspective
of → transcendental idealism (TI), for which
objects first arise through conceptual deter-
minations of the representations in intuition
of the sensory manifold, the failure of TR to
resolve the mathematical antinomies amounts
to an indirect proof of the veracity of TI.
This important result may seem to depend
crucially upon the validity of the proofs of the
theses and antitheses. These are, however, gen-
erally regarded as problematic. The antithesis
of the First Antinomy thus relies upon a →
principle of sufficient reason. From the obser-
vation that there is no sufficient reason for the
world to begin at any particular time or to be
located in any determinate position in space,
it follows that a bounded world has multiple
situatability in space/time. Such indetermi-
nacy is, of course, not thinkable in a realist
framework. The endorsement of the principle
of sufficient reason is problematic, although it
is at least shared by Kant’s immediate target,
Leibnizian philosophy (→ Leibniz).
The verificationist principle underpinning
the thesis of the First Antinomy is arguably
more problematic. Here, the conclusion relies
upon the impossibility of thinking the world
as a totum syntheticum, i.e. a whole com-
posed of parts given separately. Some argue
however that this way of thinking the world
is shared by the transcendental realist. Similar
issues arise for the Second Antinomy, with
defences of Kant by some commentators for
the thesis, and some others for the antithesis.
If, however, the proofs are considered
unsatisfactory, the antinomies can still func-
tion in support of TI. They could be seen as
identifying states of affairs which conflict
with aspects of our rationality. So, if either
Key Themes and Topics
one of the thesis or antithesis of an antinomy
were to be known to be true, the proofs show
that we would not be able to grasp how
this is possible: they would still ‘remov[e]
one inconceivability only to replace it with
another’ (A485=B513).
Insofar as these antinomies show that
there is some way of making the thesis or
antithesis appear inconceivable in the light of
principles that it is natural and coherent for a
rational being to adopt, they identify a prob-
lem for which TI has a solution while TR
has none. It would, moreover, be irrational
to adopt a framework (TR) which conflicts
with rationality in this way.
This important result, together with the far-
reaching consequences of the Third Antinomy
for Kant’s practical philosophy, ensures that
the Antinomy of Pure Reason has a central
role in Kant’s Critical philosophy. – CO
Further Reading
N. Fischer (ed.), Kants Grundlegung einer
kritischen Metaphysik (Hamburg: Meiner,
2010), pp. 243–311.
M. Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental
Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), ch. 6.
L. Kreimendahl, ‘Die Antinomie der reinen
Vernunft, 1. und 2. Abschnitt’, in G.
Mohr, M. Willaschek (eds), Immanuel
Kant. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in
the series Klassiker Auslegen (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 1998), pp. 413–446.
E. Watkins, Kant and the Metaphysics
of Causality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), ch. 5.
A. Wood, ‘The Antinomies of Pure Reason’,
in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Kant’s ‘Critique of
Pure Reason’ (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), pp. 245–265.
180
Appearance
At B34 in CPR, Kant defines an ‘appearance’
(Erscheinung) as ‘an indeterminate object of
an empirical → intuition’. An appearance is
also called an object of perception (B207,
225), a ‘possible object’ (B459), or an object
of possible → experience (B298). This con-
trasts, strictly speaking, with ‘object’ as the
translation for Gegenstand (A109) or Objekt
(B137) (→ object), which is a determinate
object as a result of the application of the
categories by means of an act of → apper-
ception or the understanding, and is always a
function of → judgment. Every ‘object’ is an
‘appearance’, but not every appearance is an
object in the strict sense of the definition at
B137. Sometimes, Kant may seem to use the
terms ‘object’ and ‘appearance’ interchange-
ably, especially when used in the plural, but
whenever Kant refers to appearances as the
objects of our experience, he means to refer
to the objects that we make judgments about,
and that are ordered in accordance with the
a priori laws of experience. Strictly speaking,
appearances are that out of which experi-
ences of objects are constructed by means
of the categories, or as Kant famously says,
appearances are spelled out ‘according to a
synthetic unity in order to be able to read
them as experiences’ (B370–371=A314; P
312–313).
This differentiation between ‘appearance’
and ‘object’ is connected with Kant’s → tran-
scendental idealism, and also points to the
crucial distinction between intuition and
concept (→ logic). As to the latter distinction
in relation to appearance: for Kant, a deter-
minate object of experience is never given in
perception, on the basis of which we could
conceptually form judgments about these
objects that we perceive. The term ‘appear-
ance’ indicates that an object is never merely

given as such, but is always to some extent
mind-dependent, i.e. ‘appearing to some
subject s’. A determinate object is basically
the synthetic, conceptual unification of the
appearance or manifold of appearances in
intuition, so that the objects of our judgments
are nothing but the appearances that are the
undetermined objects of an empirical intui-
tion in abstraction from the determination of
them as objective by the pure concepts, i.e.,
categories. The term ‘appearance’ thus strad-
dles the intuition-concept distinction.
This also explains why Kant can say that
‘objects can indeed appear to us without
necessarily having to be related to func-
tions of the understanding’ (A89=B122).
Appearances ‘nonetheless offer objects to
our intuition’, even if they were not found to
‘accord with the conditions that the under-
standing requires for the synthetic unity’ that
establishes objective knowledge (A90=B122–
3). This is a controversial passage, which has
recently spawned a whole debate among
conceptualist and nonconceptualist readers
of the relation between appearance/intuition
and conceptual activity. The central ques-
tion is to what extent conceptual activity is
involved in sensible intuition and whether
appearances are in fact possible without the
understanding. Sometimes, Kant argues as if
appearances necessarily entail possible sub-
sumption under the categories (A119). But it
seems clear that, for Kant, appearances are
not eo ipso objects determined by the under-
standing. Appearances can be merely subjec-
tive (B234–236=A189–191).
Kant sometimes also refers to determi-
nate appearances as phenomena, to differ-
entiate them from appearances generally:
‘Appearances, to the extent that as objects
they are thought in accordance with the
unity of the categories, are called phaenom-
ena’ (A248–249). In ID (392–394), Kant
181
Key Themes and Topics
associated phenomena with the objects of
sensible representations, ‘of things as they
appear’, in contrast to intellectual represen-
tations, which represent ‘things as they are’.
He further specified that appearances pre-
cede the logical use of the understanding,
while strictly speaking only objects of expe-
rience are phenomena, where experience is
when ‘several appearances are compared by
the understanding’.
This introduces an idealist aspect. An
object as phenomenon must be distin-
guished from a → thing in itself (B69). We
only know things insofar as they appear to
us, that is, as appearances (cf. Bxxv–xxvii,
A34–35=B51, B59ff.=A42ff.; P 283, 286,
288–290). Appearances are not things in
themselves (B66=A49; A101; A165=B206),
therefore do not exist in themselves (B164;
A505=B533), which seems to suggest their
merely virtual existence in us (A127; A129)
or that they are merely the appearing parts
or aspects of things in themselves (B59=A42)
(this constitutes the ‘transcendental ideality
of appearances’; A506=B534). Kant says that
appearances are given only in an empirical
synthesis (B527=A499), which means that
their existence depends on the synthesis by the
understanding. However, the precise relation
between appearances and things in themselves
is intensely disputed (see → thing in itself).
Notoriously, Kant also asserts that
appearances are ‘mere representations’
(A490–491=B518–519; B522=A493–494;
B535=A507; A563=B591; A537=B565;
A104; A370, A372; A391), which might seem
to imply that genuine objective → reality is
denied of them. But objective reality is first
conferred on the appearances by the under-
standing, whereas things in themselves pre-
cisely lack objective reality, namely a reality
that is determinable for and by us. The fact that
appearances are ‘mere representations’ thus
Key Themes and Topics
does not make them any less real. Moreover,
appearances are given in space, which ‘with
all its appearances, as representations’, is also
‘only in me’, but in which ‘the real, or the
material of all objects of outer intuition is nev-
ertheless really given’ (A375). An appearance
(Erscheinung) is therefore not ‘mere illusion’
(Schein) (B69, B349, B125, B157).
That in which the manifold of the appear-
ance is ‘ordered in certain relations’, is the →
form of the appearance. This form lies ready
in the mind → a priori (B34=A20), and hence
constitutes the necessary subjective aspect
of an appearance. The mere form of appear-
ance is → pure intuition (B36=A22), and it
is twofold: i.e. the pure forms of intuition
space and time (B50; A385–386), which are
the pure forms of outer and inner appear-
ances respectively (B38–39; B50; A385–386,
A690=B718), and time is the ‘a priori condi-
tion of all appearance in general’ (B50) (→
Transcendental Aesthetic). An appearance can
thus be an object of both inner and outer sense
(→ inner/outer sense). The matter of appear-
ance is what corresponds to sensation, which
is the result of the affection of things, and is
an a posteriori element of appearance that is
independent of the a priori forms of the mind
(B34=A20; P 284), so only for its form is an
appearance dependent on the mind. – DS
Further Reading
L. Allais, ‘Kant’s idealism and the secondary
quality analogy’, Journal of the History of
Philosophy 45,3 (2007): 459–484.
C. Marshall, ‘Kant’s appearances and
things in themselves as qua‐objects’,
The Philosophical Quarterly 63 (2013):
520–545.
G. Prauss, Erscheinung bei Kant (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1971).
182
Apperception
(self-consciousness)
In the B-Deduction, Kant defines pure apper-
ception as ‘that self-consciousness which,
because it produces the representation I
think, which must be able to accompany all
others and which in all consciousness is one
and the same, cannot be accompanied by
any further representation’ (B132). It is an
‘unchanging consciousness’ (A107) or the
thought or awareness of the ‘thoroughgoing
identity of self-consciousness’ (B135).
Pure apperception is distinguished from
empirical apperception, which is derived from
pure apperception ‘under given conditions in
concreto’ (B140), is ‘forever variable’, and ‘can
provide no standing or abiding self in [the]
stream of inner appearances’ (A107). In con-
trast to pure apperception, empirical apper-
ception is the accompaniment of individual
(B133) rather than the totality of all my rep-
resentations (B131) and thus has ‘merely sub-
jective validity’ (B140). Therefore, empirical
apperception is to be regarded as the subjec-
tive unity of consciousness, while pure apper-
ception is an objective or transcendental unity
of self-consciousness (B132, 139).
Pure apperception is self-consciousness
stricto sensu, viz. an awareness of the thor-
oughgoing or numerical → identity of one-
self as the person having that awareness
(A107–108; B133). Hence, Kant speaks of
pure apperception as the representation of
the ‘I think’. But it should be stressed that
self-consciousness is for Kant in the first
instance that type of consciousness which
provides the ground for all other conscious-
ness and is not to be equated with empirical
self-consciousness, as it is itself unchanging
and merely formal (cf. B422–423n.; P 333–
334) (→ Paralogisms). Hence, it is also called
original apperception (B132).

Quite appropriately, then, Kant uses the
Leibnizian term l’aperception (cf. Leibniz,
Monadology §14; Principles of Nature and
Grace, §4) (→ Leibniz) to indicate that self-
consciousness must be distinguished from the
manifold states of first-order consciousness
in internal perception, of which I can have
a higher-order awareness. Kant frequently
uses simply the term ‘consciousness’ when he
speaks of apperception, but from the context
it is clear that in such cases he means self-con-
sciousness, not mere consciousness (cf. A103).
Transcendental or pure apperception is a ‘uni-
versal self-consciousness’ (B133), which it is
necessary to presuppose in order to have a self-
conscious awareness of one’s identical self.
Another aspect of pure apperception,
which relates to synthesis, is its → sponta-
neity (B132) as opposed to the merely pas-
sive sense in which empirical apperception
occurs, which Kant identifies with inner
sense (A107) (→ inner/outer sense).
Pure apperception plays an important role
in the → deduction of the categories. It is
the function of unity that is required for the
possibility of → experience as well as of the
objects of experience. Pure apperception thus
provides the basis for the objective unity that
lies in the categories: ‘The numerical unity
of this apperception therefore grounds all
concepts a priori [. . .].’ (A107) Kant shows
the interconnectedness between self-con-
sciousness and possible experience of objects
by demonstrating that an analytic unity of
consciousness, that is, the thoroughgoing
identity of apperception, rests on an implicit
awareness of an a priori act of → synthesis
among one’s appearances (B133; A108).
This synthesis is not given, but is the result
of an act by means of which a manifold of rep-
resentations is combined into a unity, whose
conception is the representation of ‘the identity
of the consciousness in these representations
183
Key Themes and Topics
itself’ (B133). By the fact that ‘the analytic
unity of apperception is only possible under
the presupposition of some synthetic one’
(B133) Kant means that the act of apperceiv-
ing the manifold of representations by virtue
of synthesizing them, viz. the synthetic unity
of apperception, is cotemporaneous with the
analytic unity or awareness of identity among
one’s representations. Synthesis is a logically
prior condition of the analytic unity of self-
consciousness. That is, a priori synthesis is
both a necessary and sufficient condition for
the representation of the analytical identity of
self-consciousness. No analytic unity of the
self obtains without a prior synthesis, but also
no a priori synthesis fails to result in an ana-
lytic unity of apperception (cf. A108).
It is this implied, or ‘antecedently con-
ceived’ (B133n.), synthesis or synthetic unity
which provides the insight into the intertwine-
ment between pure apperception and objec-
tive unity, as it is the a priori synthesis which
constitutes the objective unity that makes both
the self and the object of experience possible.
It is thus the act of synthesis that yields an
objective unity of representations (cf. B137; →
object, objectivity). Objective unity is therefore
analytically implied in pure apperception.
In the decade prior to the publication of
CPR in 1781, specifically in the so-called
Duisburg Nachlass, which are Kant’s notes
from 1775–76 (esp. Refl 4674–4679), Kant
first experimented with the notion of apper-
ception as the principle for a deduction of the
categories but it is arguably only in the second
version of the Deduction, published in 1787,
that Kant actually manages to derive the cat-
egories from the principle of apperception
by starting the argument with the so-called
‘I think’-proposition, by means of which, as
we saw above, Kant formally defines self-
consciousness. It should be noted however
that the ostensible analogy between self-
Key Themes and Topics
consciousness and the way we must conceive
of objects continues to be a highly controver-
sial issue among Kant commentators. – DS
Further Reading
K. Ameriks, Kant’s Theory of Mind. An
Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure
Reason, new edition (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2000).
K. Ameriks, ‘Kantian apperception and the
non-Cartesian subject’, in Kant and the
Historical Turn. Philosophy as Critical
Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon,
2006), pp. 51–66.
W. Carl, Der schweigende Kant. Die
Entwürfe zu einer Deduktion der
Kategorien vor 1781 (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989),
esp. pt. III.
P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987), esp. chs 3 and 5.
P. Kitcher, Kant’s Thinker (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011).
H. Klemme, Kants Philosophie des Subjekts
(Hamburg: Meiner, 1996).
D. Schulting, Kant’s Deduction and
Apperception. Explaining the Categories
(Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012).
Apprehension → synthesis
A priori, a posteriori
Kant introduces the distinction between a pri-
ori and a posteriori cognition in the first section
of both introductions to CPR (A2=B2). This
epistemological distinction characterizes →
knowledge in relation to → experience. A priori
184
knowledge is ‘independent of all experience’
(B2–3): it is → pure. A posteriori knowledge
has its source in experience: it is empirical.
To identify the domain of a priori knowl-
edge, Kant identifies its two characteristic fea-
tures. In modal terms, it is necessary; in terms
of its scope, it is strictly universal (B3–4). The
latter is a covertly modal feature: it amounts
to the claim that ‘no exception at all is allowed
to be possible’ (B4). This modality is always
understood in relation to experience, i.e.
defined in terms of our type of cognition. The
→ necessity of a priori knowledge is therefore
weaker than that of logical necessity; but its
certainty is stronger than mere (empirical) psy-
chological necessity (B5). It can be described
as transcendental psychological necessity.
After briefly showing that there is a pri-
ori knowledge, e.g. → mathematics (B5),
Kant outlines the central task of CPR as the
examination of the possibility of a priori
knowledge so as to circumscribe this cogni-
tive domain (A2–6=B6–10). – CO
Further Reading
Ph. Kitcher, ‘A priori’, in P. Guyer (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Kant
and Modern Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006),
pp. 28–60.
Art (genius)
The first part of CJ, Critique of the Aesthetic
Power of Judgment, draws a distinction
between two sorts of judgment of beauty (CJ
229–231 [§16]; 311–313 [§48]): (1) pure
judgments of taste are judgments of an object
‘according to mere form’ (CJ 229) (→ form);
(2) adherent judgments of taste are ‘ascribed to

objects that stand under the concept of a par-
ticular end’ (CJ 229). The first are the primary
subject matter of the Analytic and their para-
digmatic object is natural beauty (→ aesthetic
judgment). Adherent judgments are the subject
matter of the sections on beautiful art (esp.
§§43–50 [CJ 303–320]) and their paradig-
matic object is artistic beauty. Surprisingly, art-
works cannot be the objects of pure judgments
of taste. The notion of genius and the analysis
of the creative process elucidates why this is so.
The creation of beautiful art harnesses
two necessary and jointly sufficient abilities.
One is the acquired skill to produce a work
according to certain academic rules of repre-
sentation. The other is genius, a rare innate
talent to create the original content of the
work, which is ‘not yet known at all before
the artist who made it’ (Anthr 224). Thus,
genius endows yet unborn artworks with
original mental content or ‘material’, whereas
the embodiment of this material in an object
requires ‘academically trained’ skill (CJ 310).
A detailed characterization of this original
content or, in Kant’s terminology, new rule,
is given in §49 (CJ 313–319). There are two
elements to this rule: an aesthetic idea and an
idea of reason. An aesthetic idea is a mental
representation, the origin of which is the free
creative power of the → imagination. The
manner in which an aesthetic idea is created
is, therefore, original (Anthr 224–225). Kant
gives two alternative formulations as to why
he names these representations ideas: the fact
that they are sensible complements of ideas
of reason and, consequently, their endlessly
fertile indeterminacy.
Although the imagination initially draws
the material for creating these representations
from nature, they represent ideas of reason
(→ idea, ideas). An idea of reason always des-
ignates a concept which far exceeds what can
be given in intuition (A320=B377); as such,
185
Key Themes and Topics
its content is infinite. The mysterious mental
ability to represent sensibly an idea of reason
creates such abundance in the representation
and its details that it is by definition never
fully determinate, that is, the meaning of an
artwork can never be fully articulated.
Genius is the distinct mental capacity that
finds an original representation that is the
sensible correlate of an idea of reason. The
artist aspires to give concrete expression to
this mental representation in an artwork.
Thus, art is a product of intentional causality.
The conception of its creator is the origin of
its existence. An artwork is thus an end, the
product of purposive activity (→ teleology).
The end of a work of art is the concept of
what it is meant to depict. The judgment of
an artwork as beautiful always presupposes
this end and concept. It is for this reason that
the judgment is adherent or ‘no longer purely
aesthetic’ (CJ 311). – AR
Further Reading
H. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A
Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), ch. 12.
P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste,
second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
Autonomy → freedom
Axioms of Intuition
The discussion of the principle of the Axioms
of Intuition is the first part of Kant’s Analytic
of Principles in CPR and thus marks the
opening of the detailed schematization of the
categories that was promised in the chapter
Key Themes and Topics
on → schematism. The question of the appli-
cability of the principles of → mathematics
to experience has not been settled by Kant’s
argument for taking these principles to be
synthetic a priori in the → Transcendental
Aesthetic (B40–41). Kant turns to provid-
ing a justification for the applicability of the
principles of mathematics to experience in the
first two parts of the Analytic of Principles,
which concern this section and the following
one on the → Anticipations of Perception.
These two sets of principles are thus
termed ‘mathematical’ not because they are
principles within mathematics but rather
because they are principles that make ‘pure
mathematics [. . .] applicable to objects of
experience’ (A165=B206). In the second edi-
tion of CPR, just prior to the Axioms, Kant
adds a note indicating that the type of → syn-
thesis involved in these ‘mathematical’ prin-
ciples is a ‘composition’ in which the parts
have no necessary connection to each other
as when two triangles emerge from a division
of a square (B201n). This synthesis is gener-
ally one of homogeneous elements but, in the
case of the principle of the Axioms, it also
concerns ‘aggregates’.
As is the case with many of the other
principles the statement of this one alters
between the two editions of CPR with the
A-version referring to ‘appearances’ in their
intuition while the B-version merely discusses
→ intuition. Both versions, however, describe
intuitions as being ‘extensive magnitudes’ by
which is meant that they possess a represen-
tation whose whole only arises by means of
combination of the parts (B203).
This conception of ‘extensive magnitudes’
is illustrated with the example of drawing a
line in thought which is meant to show that
to get the conception of what a line involves
we have to bring it into being, something that
cannot be done all at once. This point about
186
the line is further suggested to apply to how
we are able to describe a determinate sense of
temporal objects since these also require that
an aggregative synthesis take place.
This argument seems to refer back to the
point in the A-Deduction concerning the
unity of all temporal representation (A99).
The point of insisting upon it is to suggest
that empirical consciousness requires, in
order to cognize anything at all, the same
form of combination that is at work in gen-
erating mathematical objects and this is the
reason for thinking that mathematical objects
are cognizable within experience.
The principle of the Axioms of Intuition
is explicitly presented as the basis of geo-
metrical construction and Kant gives a
series of statements that arise naturally as
cardinal for Euclidean → geometry in this
context (A162–163=B203). It is these latter
that are the Axioms and the transcendental
principle referring to ‘extensive magnitudes’
is the principle that makes possible their
cognition.
Kant also distinguishes here between the
principles of geometry and those of arith-
metic pointing out that the latter, while syn-
thetic like those of geometry, are not general
as they do not describe objects that can be
given in many different manners but only
their particular possibility in one way. Kant’s
point here is that numerals are not capable
of being represented in various ways, as for
example triangles are. For something to be
a part of an arithmetical addition it has to
belong to a set that enables its classification
with others of the same type.
Kant’s philosophy of mathematics is
intended to be given a ground by means of
the defence of the principle of the Axioms
but, while the philosophy of mathematics
Kant presents has itself proved controversial,
the transcendental principles underlying it

have been more rarely treated to extended
treatment. – GB
Further Reading
G. Banham, Kant’s Transcendental
Imagination (Basingstoke/New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), ch. 6.
H. Klemme, ‘Die Axiome der
Anschauung und die Antizipationen
der Wahrnehmung’, in G. Mohr, M.
Willaschek (eds), Immanuel Kant.
Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in the series
Klassiker Auslegen (Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 1998), pp. 247–266.
B. Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to
Judge (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1998), ch. 9.
Capacity to judge → judgment
Categorical imperative
(moral law)
In the first section of G, Kant proceeds by
elimination to identify what is uncondition-
ally good. Drawing on our moral intuitions,
his investigation homes in on the good → will
as the only thing that is good in itself, and
independently of anything else (G 393). The
latter condition implies that the good will’s
action cannot be motivated by any inclina-
tion, but only by reason (G 396). The concept
of duty (→ duty, duties) is then introduced
to explain the moral worth of the good will:
the good will’s action must be in accordance
with and from duty (G 397). Finally, Kant
unpacks the notion of duty by noting that to
do one’s duty involves acting in conformity
to a law (the moral law), and out of respect
for it (G 400).
187
Key Themes and Topics
In the second section of G, Kant translates
this common understanding of morality in
terms of rules or principles that will consti-
tute the synthetic a priori judgments of prac-
tical rationality (G 412, 420). Considering
how rules operate as imperatives in practical
rationality (G 413), Kant notes that we have
no difficulty making sense of hypothetical
imperatives. Either in the form of rules of skill
spelling out how to contribute to advancing a
specific purpose (‘Use a serrated knife to cut
bread’), or counsels of prudence where the
end of happiness is assumed (‘Avoid excess’),
they are essentially unproblematic because
analytic (G 416–419).
But unconditional goodness is not good-
ness with respect to the pursuit of a certain
end (G 416). The command which enjoins us
to do what is morally good cannot therefore
be hypothetical, but must be categorical. For
a categorical imperative, however, the ques-
tion of its possibility arises (G 419).
Kant proceeds to settle it by exhibiting the
content of such an imperative. In line with
section I, Kant claims that morality requires
our maxim of action to conform to a prac-
tical law (G 420). Since all that character-
izes this law is that it is universally valid,
he claims that a maxim which conforms to
it must be universalizable. And since action
on the law must be motivated by respect
for the law, it is the universalizability of
the maxim that must provide the motive
for morally worthy action. Kant expresses
this motivational constraint in terms of the
requirement that it be possible simultane-
ously to will that this maxim be universal
law (G 420–421).
In the examples (G 421–423), Kant
chooses to illustrate the application of the
Formula of Universal Law (FUL), by refer-
ring to a modified version. Here, the require-
ment is the more usable one that one act as
Key Themes and Topics
though one’s maxim were to become a uni-
versal law of nature (G 421).
Kant shows how the FUL can be used to
identify what is forbidden by the moral law.
There are essentially two ways in which a
maxim can fail to pass the test of the FUL
(G 424). These are generally known as the con-
tradiction in conception (CC) and the contra-
diction in the will (CW). Both tests essentially
rely upon there being basic rules of practical
rationality. According to this ‘logic of the will’,
there is a contradiction in willing an end and
not having the means to achieve it.
In the CC case, willing the universali-
zation of the maxim amounts to willing a
situation in which some means required by
the end of one’s action are no longer avail-
able. In the CW case, the agent thereby wills
that certain means which foster the pursuit
of her ends not be available. Thus, willing
that all agents break their promises when
convenient amounts to willing a situation in
which promises will no longer be accepted.
This contradicts (CC) the purpose of profit-
ing from breaking one’s promise (G 422).
In the second case (CW), the contradiction
is located, not in the universalization itself, but
rather between this universalization and the
agent’s pursuits of her ends. Thus, willing that
no-one provide help to those in need amounts
to willing that one never be helped, even when
this would serve one’s ends (G 423).
As a result, the duties defined by these contra-
dictions are of different strength and scope. The
first define perfect and strict duties, such as that
of self-preservation. There is no room for inter-
pretation here, and the obligation can be dis-
charged. The second define imperfect and broad
duties, as the duty to cultivate one’s talents. There
is scope for inclinations to guide our choices and
the obligation cannot be discharged.
Kant’s FUL is only the first form of the cate-
gorical imperative. Noting that all human action
188
is directed to an end, that of dutiful action has
to be objective and hold for all rational beings
(G 428). Only persons have absolute worth,
so humanity is the only possible objective end.
Kant characterizes humanity as the ability to
formulate ends for one’s actions.
This gives rise to the Formula of Humanity
(FH), which enjoins us never to treat others as
means only, but always also as ends (G 429).
This formula is useful in dealing with certain
cases of immoral actions that the FUL is not
able to exhibit as forbidden. Its ability to
deal with such maxims stems from the fact
that it is the end of humanity which bestows
value upon the agent’s ends.
As a result, natural actions such as suicide
can be dealt with using the FH. Kant shows
that a maxim of committing suicide when life
becomes unbearable does not pass the FH
test (G 429). Indeed, an agent’s end of mak-
ing one’s life bearable to the end acquires its
value from that of the humanity of the agent.
To destroy his agency is to destroy the source
of this value, which exhibits a contradiction
in terms of practical rationality.
Kant provides two more formulations of
the categorical imperative, each designed
to add a different dimension to its content.
The Formula of Autonomy adds a reflexive
dimension, i.e. defining how a moral agent
should view herself, namely as an autono-
mous legislator (G 432) (→ spontaneity).
The formula of the → kingdom of ends adds
an inter-subjective dimension through the
conception of the legislator as a member of
a realm of autonomous legislators (G 433–
436). Both formulas, which Kant presents
without derivation, bring the categorical
imperative closer to our intuitions.
There have been a number of objections to
Kant’s conception of the categorical impera-
tive. Most prominently, Hegel claimed that
some prior knowledge of the good is required,

else the good will could be wrong about what
is good. Hegel also seems to think an appeal
to the value of certain institutions (e.g. prom-
ising) is required if the categorical imperative
is to successfully reject maxims such as that
of breaking one’s promises. But this gets
the order wrong: the categorical imperative
defines what is right, and doing what is right,
because one sincerely holds it to be right, is
morally worthy.
Focusing on the FUL, Hegel claimed that
it is empty as it cannot, for instance, rule out
universal egoism. This however overlooks
the fact that it is not rational to pursue an
end and simultaneously not to want to be
helped to achieve it  – or the end has been
wrongly formulated in the first place.
Many objections, such as Mill’s claim
that a notion of universal utility must be
presupposed when carrying out the FUL
test, fail largely because of problematic
interpretations of the notion of contradic-
tion in conception. These problems have
been tackled in different ways in the lit-
erature, although issues remain however,
in particular that of how specific a maxim
of action should be for the FUL testing
procedure. – CO
Further Reading
S. Kerstein, ‘Deriving the formula of
universal law’, in G. Bird (ed.), A
Companion to Kant (Malden, MA/
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010),
pp. 308–321.
C. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of
Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), pt. I.
C. Onof, ‘A framework for the derivation
and reconstruction of the categorical
imperative, Kant-Studien 89 (1998):
410–427.
189
Key Themes and Topics
J. Timmermann, Kant’s Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007).
A. Wood, ‘The supreme principle of
morality’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Kant and
Modern Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006),
pp. 342–380.
A. Wood, ‘Kant’s formulations of
the moral law’, in G. Bird (ed.), A
Companion to Kant (Malden, MA/
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010),
pp. 291–307.
Categories → deduction
Causality → Analogies of
Experience, laws (of nature)/
lawfulness
Choice → will
Clear/obscure →
representation
COGNITION → KNOWLEDGE
Combination → synthesis
Comparison → logic
Concept → logic
Consciousness →
representation, apperception,
Anticipations of Perception
Cosmological proof → proofs
of the existence of God
Key Themes and Topics
Cosmopolitan, cosmopolitanism
The notion of cosmopolitanism already
appears in UH (1784), where Kant shows
that there are grounds to look at history as
an irregular yet inexorable unfolding of a
plan leading to a universal condition of peace
between individuals and states. He argues
that after the repeated experience of the des-
olation caused by war, humans will be com-
pelled to create institutions – the state at the
domestic level and the federation of states at
the international level – capable of regulating
their antagonism and to create a condition of
stable peace, or, as he puts it, a ‘cosmopolitan
condition of public state security’ (UH 26).
Similarly, Kant talks in TP (1793) of a
‘cosmopolitan constitution [Weltbürgerliche
Verfassung]’ (TP 310) or ‘cosmopolitan
commonwealth [Weltbürgerliches gemeines
Wesen]’ (TP 311), which is again the peace-
ful, orderly, juridical condition that mankind
will achieve when international right has
been fully implemented.
In PP (1795) and in MM (1797), however,
Kant introduces the notion of ‘cosmopolitan
right [Weltbürgerrecht]’ indicating something
different and more specific. → right (Recht)
is now a tripartite notion denoting state
right, international right and cosmopolitan
right. Cosmopolitan right concerns the rules
that all nations should adopt in the treatment
of individuals who enter foreign countries.
These rules of hospitality accord visitors
the ‘right to visit’ (PP 358) and prescribe
that strangers be treated without hostility
when they arrive on someone else’s territory.
However, cosmopolitan right does not grant
strangers a right to become members of the
hosting country. In fact, they can be ‘turn[ed]
away’ (PP 358), if this can be done without
endangering their life. It does grant them a
right ‘to visit all regions of the earth’ while
190
they attempt ‘to establish a community with
all’ (MM 353).
In PP, Kant claims that cosmopolitan right
is both (a) a condition of the accomplishment
of the cosmopolitan constitution and (b) ‘a
supplement to the unwritten code of the right
of a state and the right of nations necessary for
the sake of any public rights of human beings’
(PP 360). This is so because a right to visit ena-
bles peaceful interactions between foreigners.
It also enables international commerce, which
makes wars between economically interde-
pendent countries particularly costly and thus
unlikely. Through cosmopolitan right ‘distant
parts of the world can enter peaceably into
relations with one another, which can even-
tually become publicly lawful and so finally
bring the human race ever closer to a cosmo-
politan constitution’ (PP 358).
Cosmopolitan right is one of Kant’s most
important innovations in legal theory. While
the natural law tradition introduced the nor-
mative elements of what would then become
(and still is) international positive right, Kant
refuses to limit himself to the dichotomy
state/interstate right and proposes a tripar-
tite division, thus adding the novel concept
of cosmopolitan right. Kant thinks that indi-
viduals hold rights against states and other
individuals independently of their citizenship.
Universal hospitality – a matter of right, not
of philanthropy  – pertains to humans qua
humans. This means that although there is as
yet no global state that can enforce the rights
of individuals as citizens of the world, indi-
viduals nonetheless possess rights ultimately
resting on the intrinsic dignity of human
beings.
In the absence of a global institution that
could enforce these rights, either in the form
of a universal republic – which Kant at times
seems to consider the best global institu-
tional form – or in the form of a Federation

of States  – which at times he seems to con-
sider a more prudent surrogate, cosmopoli-
tan right establishes standards of respect that
are not only just but also conducive to the
cosmopolitan condition. Cosmopolitan right,
in this sense, anticipates the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and the norma-
tive principles on which contemporary global
institutions such as the UN are based. – LC
Further Reading
D. Archibugi, ‘Immanuel Kant, cosmopolitan
law and peace’, European Journal of
International Relations 1,4 (1995): 429–456.
J. Bohman, M. Lutz-Bachmann (eds)
Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s
Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
O. Höffe, Kant’s Cosmopolitan Theory of Law
and Peace, trans. A. Newton (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
P. Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmopolitanism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011).
Critique
Kant begins CPR with a diagnosis of the state
of → metaphysics in his days. Metaphysics is
the science of → reason as such, which is a
kind of → knowledge that must, according to
Kant, be scientific in a strict sense. The very
first pages of the ‘Preface’ in the second edi-
tion CPR make clear that Kant thinks that
the prevailing schools of philosophy, ration-
alism and → empiricism, give conflicting
accounts of the nature of metaphysics.
This situation reflects the fact that meta-
physics is clearly not yet founded on a secure
scientific footing. Other domains of science
191
Key Themes and Topics
such as → logic and → mathematics devel-
oped with a better understanding of what
we can discover in an object in conformity
with its conception. Accordingly, Kant thinks
that a ‘Copernican revolution’ is necessary in
metaphysics, which means that reason enacts
an experiment with itself by virtue of system-
atically criticizing unfounded philosophical
presumptions (→ method). This means that
reason must subject itself to a critique of its
own capacity (A738=B766; cf. Bxxxv-xxxvi;
A65–66=B90–91).
The elementary presumption of metaphysics
seems to be that knowledge ‘must conform to
the → object’ (Bxvi). Kant posits the opposite
hypothesis: the object of knowledge must → a
priori conform to our cognition. The experi-
ment that reason enacts with itself consists in
critically analyzing the character and scope of
its own concepts and seeking its own ‘objective
reality’ in relation to the object of cognition.
This results in what one may call a relativism
‘with a positive accent’. Our concepts must not
be taken as determinations of things in them-
selves for we can only know for certain that
they are the forms in which we as finite beings
must de facto intuit and think them.
In a letter to Marcus Herz of 21 February
1772 (Corr-I 130), Kant formulated the fun-
damental Critical problem for the first time
as the problem of how our representations,
that is, pure concepts of the understanding
as well as forms of → intuition, may be said
to relate to the objects of our experience, the
solution to which is expounded in detail in
CPR. His analysis starts in the ‘Introduction’
to CPR with the observation that there is
no doubt ‘that all our cognition begins with
experience’ (B1), but that importantly not all
cognition arises from → experience.
In this respect, Kant makes a crucial dis-
tinction between the → form and the mat-
ter of experience. When considering the
Key Themes and Topics
architectonic structure of CPR it becomes evi-
dent what kind of criteria are at stake in the →
transcendental analysis of theoretical knowl-
edge. It is the critical investigation of reason in
its relation to an empirical reality that remains
bound to the object as directly given in intui-
tion, as → appearance. The object as appear-
ance must be characterized in respect of its
form, more specifically, the forms of space and
time (→ Transcendental Aesthetic).
Crucial for this analysis is the distinction
Kant makes between these forms as puta-
tive forms of things and as they appear to us.
These forms belong to things as we perceive
them but they should not in fact be thought
as belonging to things in themselves (→ thing
in itself). Why, after all, should something that
is elementary for things as we know them be
interpreted as something we take as necessary
in an absolute, say ‘transcendental’, sense?
The distinction that is made here is vital
for the steps that Kant takes to restrict the
unmotivated and unfounded claims of tra-
ditional metaphysics, which takes the forms
of sensibly perceiving things to apply to
them absolutely. In the same way the neces-
sary forms of thought, the categories of the
understanding, are examined with regard to
their specific function and application.
As becomes clearer in the chapter on the
Principles of the Pure Understanding, the
entire Critical perspective is built on the cor-
relation between a priori principles of the
understanding and their real correlate: the
structure of the object as object of experience.
The ground of our knowledge of objects lies
in the way we can a priori show the correla-
tion between reason and object. It is in this
respect that the separation between phenom-
ena and noumena (→ transcendental ideal-
ism) is necessary, implying that the absolute
or ‘unconditioned necessity’ is ‘for human rea-
son [. . .] the true abyss’ (A613=B641; cf. LPöl
192
1032–1033), wherein no cognizable structure
can be discerned. This is the basis of Kant’s
critique of a metaphysical self-knowledge of
the soul (→ Paralogisms), the → proofs of the
existence of God and rational knowledge of
our moral and psychological → freedom.
The general goal of Kant’s critique is to break
with all kinds of dogmatism and scepticism.
However, the concept of things as we have to
think of them (as ‘noumena’) remains not only
admissible, but is even unavoidable; the notion
of ‘noumenon’ is a concept that sets critical
limits to sensibility (B311–312). The methodo-
logical distinction between phenomena and
noumena is thus the key to CPR as a treatise on
the method of a Critical metaphysics. – KJB
Further Reading
S. Gardner, Kant and the Critique of Pure
Reason (London/New York: Routledge,
1999), chs 1 and 2.
D. Hogan, ‘Kant’s Copernican turn and the
rationalist tradition’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Kant’s ‘Critique
of Pure Reason’ (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), pp. 21–40.
D. Schulting, ‘Kant’s Copernican analogy:
beyond the non-specific reading’, Studi
Kantiani xxii (2009): 39–65.
Deduction (categories)
In arguably the centrepiece of CPR, the
Transcendental Deduction of the Categories
(henceforth TD), Kant aims to demonstrate
the justified use of the necessary a priori con-
cepts of objective → experience. These a pri-
ori concepts are called categories. The most
important categories, which are listed in the
Table of the Categories (A80=B106) in four

classes of each three ‘moments’, are those of
relation, i.e. substance, causality and com-
munity, which play a crucial role in the →
Analogies of Experience.
In TD, Kant wants to show not only that
the categories are justifiably used – this con-
cerns the so-called quid juris question of TD
(see CPR §13 [A84–92=B116–124])  – but
also that they are the necessary a priori con-
ditions for the possibility of objective experi-
ence. These two goals are interconnected.
TD appears in two versions in CPR, com-
monly referred to as the A- and B-Deductions
corresponding to the first (1781) and second
(1787) editions of CPR. Although Kant him-
self stated (Bxxxviii) that the changes he made
in the B-version were only presentational, it
is clear that there are more dissimilarities
than Kant would have us believe, so much
so that some commentators focus entirely on
the A-version (such as Heidegger) and some
on the B-version of CPR. Nevertheless, the
objective of both versions of TD appears to
be the same: to show that experience is only
possible on condition of the applicability of
the categories.
Before Kant proceeds to show that the cat-
egories do indeed apply to any possible expe-
rience in the actual TD (which starts at A95
and B129 respectively), Kant addresses sev-
eral preliminary issues in the preceding sec-
tions (§§9–14). §§9–12 are usually referred
to as the Metaphysical Deduction (MD).
Although there is no heading thus named,
Kant retrospectively refers to these sections
with that designation at B159.
In MD, Kant provides definitions for the
terms he will use in TD and first lists, in a
Table of Categories, the various categories
that will be shown, in TD, to apply necessar-
ily to experience. This table is derived from a
table of → judgment in accord with a guiding
thread (A79=B104–105), which shows that
193
Key Themes and Topics
the categories rest on the same function of the
understanding on which the logical functions
for judgment rest (→ synthesis), and in fact
completely coincide with the latter (B159; cf.
P 305). The Table of the Categories is mod-
elled on the Table of Judgment in the sense
that the categories are ‘grounded on logical
functions in judgments’ (B131) and express
these same functions for judgment insofar as
they refer to an object outside thought. More
precisely, categories ‘are concepts of an object
in general, by means of which its intuition is
regarded as determined with regard to one of
the logical functions for judgments’ (B128).
There are some controversial issues con-
cerning the precise function of MD in relation
to the main goal of TD. This concerns, among
other things, the fact that only 12 functions
of judgment are listed and that these pre-
sumably exhaust the series of possible func-
tions for judgments. Kant thinks that if we
proceed in accordance with a principle then
we can derive fully a priori all the necessary
elementary functions of judgment, and based
on them, the necessary concepts of experi-
ence. This has been roundly criticized as it
would appear that at any rate the use of the
forms of judgment, and hence the categories,
is always already assumed in any putative
a priori demonstration of their derivability.
However, this objection rests on the assump-
tion that a deduction in the proper sense
must be something like a derivation from an
indisputable basic logical principle so as to
constitute a genuine proof and that the dem-
onstration conflates with experience itself.
Without delving further into the intrica-
cies of MD and aforementioned issues, it is
important to note that Kant wants to show
that there is a link between the way that we
think and form judgments on the basis of
concepts, which are functions of thought (cf.
A68=B93), and the way in which we refer to
Key Themes and Topics
objects outside our thoughts. Put succinctly,
Kant aims to show the intimate connection
between the subjective conditions of thought
and the objective conditions of knowledge
or experience (A89–90=B122). The genuine
challenge that Kant’s TD presents, which
makes it an argument belonging to a →
transcendental → logic, is the counterintui-
tive claim that by analyzing the structure of
discursive thought and, also fully a priori,
the way that human beings are answerable
to sensory input we can come to know all
that which makes experience of an object
possible, independently of that experience or
reference to the object itself.
TD is furthermore a transcendental deduc-
tion (a quaestio juris), and not an empirical
one (a quaestio facti), as the demonstration
concerns not the material origin of the cat-
egories or the fact that they are used but the
rightfulness of their use, that is to say, their
justified applicability to objective experience.
If Kant can show that indeed the categories
are applicable to experience, by showing that
they make experience possible, then he will
have shown their legitimate use.
If we look at the actual argument of the
more streamlined B-Deduction, it is appar-
ent that Kant divides the proof into what
has been called ‘two steps’. It is controversial
how exactly these two ‘steps’ are connected,
but it is at any rate clear what the respective
arguments are in each of these two steps. The
first step runs through §15–20 and presents
the argument concerning the necessary con-
ditions for the representation of an object in
general. The argument proceeds roughly as
follows:
  1. C
 ombination, which is the representa-
tion of a synthetic unity of the mani-
fold of representations in an intuition
and is required for possible reference to
an object, can never occur by means of
194
the senses or be derived from the objects
(B134), but requires an act of spontane-
ous → synthesis (§15).
  2. The synthetic unity achieved by this act
of synthesis involves a ‘higher’ unity.
  3. The higher unity is ‘the I think [which]
must be able to accompany all my repre-
sentations’ (§16), which shows an analytic
truth with regard to the → identity of my
self-consciousness (S) (→ apperception).
  4. S requires an a priori synthesis, i.e. a ‘tran-
scendental unity of self-consciousness’
(TUS), since S by itself is a purely formal
unity and contains no manifold.
  5. TUS is the consciousness of an a priori
synthesis (B135; cf. A108).
  6. TUS is an objective unity of conscious-
ness (OUC) (§17; cf. §18).
  7. OUC constitutes the concept of an →
object as ‘that in the concept of which the
manifold of a given intuition is united’
(B137).
  8. OUC determines the objective validity of
representations and defines a judgment
(B141).
  9. All unitary intuitions are determined
in regard to the logical functions of
judgment.
10. The categories are these logical functions
insofar as the manifold is determined in
regard to them.
11. Therefore, the categories apply to a united
manifold in an intuition (§20).
In the second step, which runs from §21 to
§26, Kant argues for the necessary applica-
tion of the categories to objects of human
sensible, i.e. spatiotemporal, experience.
The second step thus provides an argument
for the possibility of, not the mere concep-
tion, but rather the perception of an actual
empirical object (cf. §22). In the important
§24, Kant differentiates between figurative
and intellectual synthesis so as to indicate
the difference between the synthesis of rep-
resentations in general, which yields the pure

concept of an object, and the synthesis of
empirical representations in human sensibil-
ity that enables the experience of a sensible
object. Kant then argues in §26 that it is the
act of synthesis itself in sensibility – that is, a
synthesis of space and time as a priori forms
of intuition (→ Transcendental Aesthetic)  –
which establishes the synthetic unity of a spa-
tiotemporal object of sensible intuition. Any
empirical apprehension of a sensible object
is therefore subject to the a  priori synthesis
of the understanding, and a fortiori stands
under the categories. By virtue of the same
act of synthesis that determines any manifold
in general, the understanding determines sen-
sible intuition and hence the unity of space
and time itself, being the necessary forms
of sensible intuition, as themselves objects
of perception. This concludes the argument
towards the legitimation of the use of the cat-
egories in regard to objective experience.
Towards the end of §26, Kant elaborates on
the results of the deduction of the categories by
arguing that ‘all appearances of nature’ stand
under the categories. Nature itself depends
on the categories, which form the ‘original
ground of its necessary lawfulness’ (→ laws
(of nature)/lawfulness). But only ‘nature in
general, as lawfulness of appearances in space
and time’ is concerned here, as ‘natura formal-
iter spectata’ (B165), not nature in terms of
its ‘particular laws’ (B165), which is ‘natura
materialiter spectata’ (B163).
In conclusion, in TD Kant’s general argu-
ment is that (1) objects can only be thought
by means of the categories; (2) objects can
only be known in combination with intuition;
(3) intuition is for us always sensible, so that
(4) knowledge is always empirical and that
(5) therefore, knowledge is only possible of
objects of experience. This in turn concludes
the argument for the justified use of the cat-
egories, as it is hereby shown that categories
195
Key Themes and Topics
make knowledge possible by being limited to
the domain of objects of experience.
It is not only in CPR that one encounters a
deduction; also in the other Critiques are pro-
vided deductions. In CPrR (42ff.) the deduc-
tion concerns the principles of pure practical
reason (→ morality) and in CJ (279ff.) the
deduction involves the question concerning
the legitimacy of pure aesthetic judgments of
taste (→ aesthetic judgment). – DS
Further Reading
W. Carl, ‘Kant’s first drafts of the
Deduction’, in E. Förster (ed.), Kant’s
Transcendental Deductions (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1989),
pp. 3–20.
P. Guyer, ‘The Deduction of the Categories.
The metaphysical and transcendental
deductions’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Kant’s
‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010),
pp. 118–150.
B. Longuenesse, ‘Kant on a priori concepts.
The metaphysical deduction of the
categories’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Kant and Modern
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), pp. 129–168.
D. Schulting, Kant’s Deduction and
Apperception. Explaining the Categories
(Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012).
Desire → interest
Dialectic
The Transcendental Dialectic is the second
and largest part of the Logic in CPR. Yet its
Key Themes and Topics
importance is sometimes underestimated in
comparison to the Analytic, the first part of
the Logic. The Dialectic covers a range of
important topics, such as the transcenden-
tal ideas (→ idea, ideas), the → Paralogisms,
the → Antinomies and the Ideal of Pure
Reason (→ transcendental ideal), discussed
in two introductions (on reason’s transcen-
dental illusion), two books (on the concepts
or ideas and the dialectical inferences of
pure → reason) and an appendix (on the
regulative use of the ideas of pure reason
and the final aim of the natural dialectic of
human reason) (→ regulative principles).
These topics are analyzed in the context of
what Kant calls a critique of transcendental
(or dialectical) illusion, that is, a transcen-
dental investigation into pure reason’s natu-
ral tendency to transgress the boundaries of
→ knowledge or sensible cognition enforced
in the Analytic:
The second part of the transcendental
logic must [. . .] be a critique of this dialec-
tical illusion, and is called transcendental
dialectic, not as an art of dogmatically
arousing such illusion [.  .  .], but rather
as a critique of the understanding and
reason in regard to their hyperphysical
use, in order to uncover the false illu-
sion of their groundless pretensions and
to reduce their claims to invention and
amplification, putatively to be attained
through transcendental principles, to the
mere assessment and evaluation of the
pure understanding, guarding it against
sophistical tricks. (A63–64)
Kant’s conception of dialectic can therefore
best be understood from his theory of tran-
scendental illusion or, more adequately, his
theory of pure reason as the seat of a tran-
scendental illusion, since one of the central
(at least interpretive) complications of this
196
theory seems to consist precisely in the fact
that although it would ground and explain
the necessary dialectical (hence illegitimate)
reasoning of rationalist metaphysics, tran-
scendental illusion is inherent to pure reason
itself and must consequently be critically
accounted for on the level of a critique of
pure reason (→ critique).
In fact, two basic elements in Kant’s
theory of pure reason seem to be essential
to his conception of dialectic. On the one
hand, there is the ‘supreme principle of pure
reason’ (B365), at one point formulated as
follows: ‘If the conditioned is given, then
through it a regress in the series of all con-
ditions for it is given to us as a problem.’
(B526) This principle marks the demand or
need for systematic unity and completeness
of knowledge (→ system), and ultimately for
the unconditioned, that belongs to the very
nature and calling of pure reason and thus
somehow has to be fulfilled, if only in the
sense of an infinite task.
On the other hand, Kant insists that (the
same) pure reason is the seat of transcen-
dental illusion: ‘[I]n our reason [. . .] there
lie fundamental rules and maxims for its use,
which look entirely like objective principles,
and through them it comes about that the
subjective necessity of a certain connection of
our concepts on behalf of the understanding
is taken for an objective necessity, the deter-
mination of things in themselves.’ (B353)
The factor that seems to complicate the
project of the Dialectic most profoundly,
however, stems from Kant’s repeated asser-
tion that transcendental illusion, contrary
to empirical and logical illusions, is not
an artificial or avoidable one, but a natu-
ral and unavoidable one that ‘irremedi-
ably [unhintertreiblich]’ (B354) attaches to
human reason. Kant holds therefore that
the Dialectic is limited to uncovering the

transcendent judgments by which rational-
ist metaphysics is characterized: it can never
bring about that transcendental illusion,
unlike empirical or logical illusions, should
disappear and cease to be an illusion – even
if the Critical philosopher is no longer
deceived by it. – JV
Further Reading
K. Ameriks, ‘The critique of metaphysics:
the structure and fate of Kant’s Dialectic’,
in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Kant and Modern
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), pp. 269–302.
M. Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental
Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
R.-P. Horstmann, ‘Der Anhang zur
transzendentalen Dialektik’, in G. Mohr,
M. Willaschek (eds), Immanuel Kant.
Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in the series
Klassiker Auslegen (Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 1998), pp. 525–545.
M. Willaschek, ‘Kant on the necessity of
metaphysics’, in V. Rohden et al. (eds),
Recht und Frieden in der Philosophie
Kants. Akten des X. Internationalen
Kant-Kongresses, Band 1 (Berlin/New
York: de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 285–307.
Difference → identity,
Amphiboly
Displeasure, pleasure → sublime,
aesthetic judgment
Duty, duties
Kant treats morally good actions as ‘duties’
in the sense that, ultimately, they are good
197
Key Themes and Topics
not because particular individuals happen
to need, want or enjoy them or because par-
ticular authorities happen to demand them,
but for further reasons that are universal
and unconditional  – that is, for the distinc-
tively moral reasons that he describes with
his formulas (→ categorical imperative). He
also thinks that moral goodness consists not
simply in doing one’s duties, but in doing
them precisely because they are morally
good, rather than for other reasons. He calls
this doing one’s duty ‘from duty’, rather than
acting ‘in conformity with duty’ but ‘from
inclination’.
In G he also claims that it is clearer that
one acts from duty when one lacks other rea-
sons for doing one’s duty – as, for instance,
when one’s own troubles or lack of emo-
tional involvement tell against helping oth-
ers or when more immediate enjoyments
tempt one to neglect the duty to stay healthy
(G 397–398). However, he also denies that
one can ever establish with certainty whether
oneself or others acted from duty  – indeed,
he suspects that we are often over-charitable
in attributing morally good reasons to our-
selves (G 406–408; TP 284–285; MM 392–
393, 441, 446–447).
Besides distinguishing between duties to
oneself and duties to others and between
duties to do actions and duties to refrain
from actions, Kant makes two different dis-
tinctions between kinds of duties. In G he
distinguishes between ‘perfect’, or ‘narrow’,
duties and ‘imperfect’, or ‘wide’, ones on the
grounds that only the latter kind allow for
exceptions for the sake of other, non-moral
reasons.
With reference to four examples, he also
claims that the formula of universal law
(→ categorical imperative) treats the two
kinds of duties differently: our duties to
promise honestly and not to commit suicide
Key Themes and Topics
are perfect, he claims, because one cannot
coherently conceive of everyone doing the
opposite, whereas our duties to cultivate our
own talents and to help others are imperfect
because one can conceive of everyone doing
the opposite, but nonetheless not want them
to (G 421–424, 421n.).
He uses the same examples to make a cor-
responding claim about the formula of the
end in itself – namely, that a duty is perfect
when its opposite considers affected agents
merely as ‘things’ or ‘means’ to satisfy incli-
nations, while a duty is imperfect when its
opposite considers affected agents as ‘ends in
themselves’ (→ kingdom of ends), but without
actively promoting these ends (G 429–430).
In MM, on the other hand, Kant distinguishes
political from ethical duties, or duties of justice
from duties of → virtue, on the grounds that
the former are duties merely to do or refrain
from certain actions, since one can be coerced
to fulfil them, whereas the latter are duties to
recognize certain reasons for action, which
cannot be coerced. Ethical duties are therefore
‘imperfect’ or ‘wide’, he claims, not because
they allow for exceptions for the sake of non-
moral reasons, but only because they leave
some ‘playroom’ in terms of precisely which
actions fulfil or neglect them and thus allow for
exceptions for the sake of fulfilling other duties
(MM 214, 218–221, 231, 239, 375, 382, 390–
391, 410–411).
Kant also presents our manner of judging
what our duties are in two different ways.
In his treatments of the four examples in G,
he simply tests specific reasons in specific
circumstances against the formulas. But his
account in MM is more systematic. There he
claims that in reasoning over specific cases,
we must balance the requirements of different
duties against each other, particularly by pri-
oritizing political duties over ethical ones and
more general duties over more specific ones.
198
The generality of duties is a matter of
their applicability  – he derives our most
general duties by considering whether the
most general reasons, those applicable to
human beings generally, might be consist-
ent with the formulas in the most general
human circumstances, and he claims that
more specific duties are to be derived by
considering more specific reasons in more
specific circumstances (MM 216–217,
224, 390–391, 403–404, 468–469; LE
536–538). – TB
Further Reading
M. Baron, Kantian Ethics Almost Without
Apology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1995), pt. 2.
O. O’Neill, ‘Instituting principles: between
duty and action’, in M. Timmons
(ed.), Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals:
Interpretative Essays (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), pp. 331–343.
J. Timmermann, ‘Acting from duty:
inclination, reason and moral worth’, in
J. Timmermann (ed.), Kant’s Groundwork
of the Metaphysics of Morals. A Critical
Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), pp. 45–62.
Empirical realism → reality
End(s) → categorical imperative,
duty, freedom, interest,
teleology
Enlightenment
Kant’s essay E is widely regarded as giving
expression to the highest ideal of the age
of Enlightenment, namely the progressive

liberation of reason from superstition
and censorship. The essay appeared in the
December 1784 issue of the Berlinische
Monatsschrift, the journal of the Berlin
Wednesday Society, one of the many learned
societies active in Berlin at the time. The soci-
ety met regularly to discuss scientific and
political events but also topics of broad intel-
lectual interest, such as the benefits and dan-
gers of freethinking or the role of religion in
contemporary society.
Kant’s essay, as its title indicates, was
prompted by a question posed by Johann
Friedrich Zöllner, in a piece published a year
earlier in the then newly established journal.
Zöllner, one of the leading lights of the Berlin
Enlightenment, argued that the question
‘what is enlightenment?’ is ‘almost as impor-
tant as the question what is truth’ and ‘yet I
have nowhere found it answered!’
Kant rises to this challenge with a concise
and resonant reply: ‘Enlightenment is human
being’s emergence from his self-incurred
minority’ (E 35). He also provides a motto
for enlightenment: ‘Sapere aude! Have cour-
age to make use of your own understand-
ing!’ (E 35) Because of its powerful message
and accessible tone, Kant’s essay on enlight-
enment is one of few among his works,
together perhaps with G, to have found a
wide non-specialist audience. However, to
properly understand Kant’s answer to the
question of enlightenment an appreciation
of his broader philosophical commitments
is necessary.
Kant’s essay makes a diagnosis and then
proposes a treatment. The diagnosis is ‘self-
incurred minority [selbst verschuldeten
Unmündigkeit]’. The sometime translation
of the German terms mündig and unmündig
as ‘mature’ and ‘immature’ respectively, gives
the misleading impression that Kant refers
to an organic process. The adjective mündig,
199
Key Themes and Topics
however, does not have connotations of ripe-
ness. It is connected to the word for mouth,
Mund, and is specifically used to designate
the coming of age, that is, having reached an
age at which a person is legally recognized as
independent, as having rights and responsi-
bilities, in short, as having a ‘voice’.
Kant’s conception of immaturity or
minority has a precise sense; it is the ‘inabil-
ity to make use of one’s own understand-
ing without direction from another’ (E 35).
The inability Kant identifies has nothing to
do with lack of capacity. Rather it has to
do with a settled disposition to defer to the
opinions of those who ‘set themselves up as
[. . .] guardians’ and who have ‘kindly taken
it upon themselves to supervise’ the rest of us
(ibid.). The notion of ‘guardian’ has an obvi-
ous Platonic reference. → Plato entrusts the
‘guardians’ with the protection and govern-
ment of the ideal city, because they know the
Good and are able to discriminate between
right and wrong (Republic 375a–376c).
What Kant is saying here is that our own
claim to think for ourselves can be rightfully
asserted. He uses the legal term ‘naturaliter
maiorennes’, which means those who have
come of age by virtue of nature and indicates
that, having reached a certain age, a person
is recognized by law as an adult and as no
longer in need of supervision by a guardian.
The treatment proposed in the essay is
nothing short of revolutionary. To take the
first steps to maturity all that is needed is
enlightenment, which consists in the ‘freedom
to make public use of one’s reason’ (E 36)
(→ reason). This use of reason is one anyone
can make, Kant insists. So we are all invited
to suspend our habitual reliance on external
authority and assert the rights of our own
reason. This is not mere self-assertion, how-
ever. Rather, we are asked to submit our rea-
soning to a putatively universal public.
Key Themes and Topics
Historically, the idea was revolutionary
because it asks for freedom from censure
and from censorship for all communications.
Kant’s examples of such communications
include criticisms of military discipline, of
the tax system, and the church. In addition,
publicity liberates reason from being put to
the service of specific interest groups, and this
means not just those who set to abuse reason
to suit their ends, but also those who profess
to serve it, such as members of enlightened
societies who selectively publicize their com-
munications or of scientific academies who
set themselves up as modern day oracles.
The idea of a public use of reason is also
conceptually revolutionary. Kant holds that
reason’s ‘authority [Ansehen]’ (A738=B766)
rests on → freedom. Freedom is to be under-
stood not only negatively as absence of
constraints, but also positively as consist-
ing precisely of those constraints that test
our reasoning and so justify reason’s ‘claim
[Ausspruch]’ (ibid.) on us.
Relevant here is the notion of → critique
employed in Kant’s major philosophical
works: enlightenment understood as public
use of reason amounts to a popular critique
of reason, a way, that is, to achieve self-crit-
ical thinking in all matters. The theoretical
underpinning for the notion of ‘publicity’
employed here is provided by Kant’s con-
viction that only the equivalent of a univer-
salizability test for reasoning can challenge
self-serving maxims of thinking.
The goal is to achieve ‘liberal’ (Anthr
200) or ‘broad-minded’ thinking, which
Kant characterizes as the ability to ‘think
in the position of everyone else’ (CJ 294).
Such thinking has an ineradicable practical
dimension. It requires being ‘in communica-
tion with human beings’ (Anthr 200) and so
addressing a real public and being challenged
by it.
200
Much of the contemporary criticism of
the enlightenment project fails to take into
account the distinctive nature of Kant’s own
interpretation of enlightenment as a practice
of thinking with others. Kantian enlight-
enment is not a rationalist utopia. It is a
practice of communication through which
everyone takes responsibility for promoting
the fragile and difficult freedom of the public
use of reason.
It is these broader concerns that account
for the continuing interest and relevance of
Kant’s interpretation of enlightenment. Kant
seeks to show that the interest his contem-
poraries should take in their own enlighten-
ment and the commitments this involves, to
reason inclusively and publicly, are a matter
of ‘treat[ing] the human being, who is now
more than a machine, in keeping with his
dignity’ (E 42). – KD
Further Reading
K. Deligiorgi, Kant and the Culture of
Enlightenment (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
2006).
P. Niesen, Kants Theorie der Redefreiheit
(Baden-Baden: Nomos 2008).
O. O’Neill, Constructions of Reason:
Explorations of Kant’s Practical
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989).
Enthusiasm
In the Kantian philosophical lexicon, the
English term ‘enthusiasm’ can express
both the German terms Enthusiasmus and
Schwärmerei. However, from the beginning
of the 1760s, Kant differentiates between
the two concepts as → Herder’s annotations

to Kant’s lectures testify (LE 175–177). In a
footnote in Obs Kant writes:
Fanaticism [Schwärmerei] must always
be distinguished from enthusiasm
[Enthusiasmus]. The former believes
itself to feel an immediate and extraor-
dinary communion with a higher nature,
the latter signifies the state of the mind
which is inflamed beyond the appropri-
ate degree by some principle, whether it
be by the maxim of patriotic virtue, or of
friendship, or of religion, without involv-
ing the illusion of a supernatural com-
munity. (Obs 251n.; cf. DSS 348, 365)
What distinguishes fanaticism from enthu-
siasm is the belief in the implication of a
supernatural and divine cause in the deter-
mination of the activity of the mind. In par-
ticular, Kant has in mind the British moral
philosophers such as Shaftesbury and also
→ Pietism.
In the contemporary essay EMH, Kant
gives concrete examples from morality by
distinguishing enthusiasm from fanaticism
and considering the latter as a negative aspect
of the life of the mind, which is deceived by
false appearances (or chimeras):
This two-sided appearance of fantasy in
moral sensations that are in themselves
good is enthusiasm [Enthusiasmus],
and nothing great has ever been accom-
plished in the world without it. Things
stand quite differently with the fanatic
(visionary, enthusiast [Schwärmer]).
The latter is properly a deranged person
with presumed immediate inspiration
and a great familiarity with the powers
of the heavens. Human nature knows no
more dangerous illusion. (EMH 267)
In CJ, Kant asserts that enthusiasm arises
when the idea of the good is connected
201
Key Themes and Topics
with affect. ‘This state of mind’, Kant says,
‘seems to be sublime, so much so that it is
commonly maintained that without it noth-
ing great can be accomplished’. In particular,
enthusiasm is ‘aesthetically sublime, because
it is a stretching of the powers through ideas,
which give the mind a momentum that acts
far more powerfully and persistently than
the impetus given by sensory representa-
tions’ (CJ 272).
Fanaticism, instead, is ‘a delusion of being
able to see something beyond all bounds
of sensibility, i.e., to dream in accordance
with principles (to rave with reason) [. . .]’
(CJ 275). In CF, Kant explains the anthro-
pological importance of the concept of
‘enthusiasm’:
[T]he passionate participation in the
good with affect, i.e., enthusiasm
(although not to be wholly esteemed,
since all affect as such deserves censure),
provide[s] through this history the occa-
sion for the following remark which is
important for anthropology: genuine
enthusiasm always moves only toward
what is ideal and, indeed, to what is
purely moral, such as the concept of
right, and it cannot be grafted onto self-
interest. (CF 86; trans. amended)
In this last moral sense enthusiasm is referred
to also in CPrR (cf. CPrR 157) and it is
extremely important for Kant’s ethics and
philosophy of history. – MS
Further Reading
R. Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the
Revelation of Freedom (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp.
169–214.
P. Fenves (ed.), Raising the Tone of
Philosophy. Late Essays by Immanuel
Key Themes and Topics
Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques
Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999).
G. Johnson, ‘The tree of melancholy: Kant on
philosophy and enthusiasm’, in C. Firestone,
S. Palmquist (eds), Kant and the New
Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 43–61.
S. Meld Shell, The Embodiment of
Reason. Kant on Spirit, Generation, and
Community (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), pt. 5.
Ether → natural science, Euler
Ethical commonwealth
(ethical community) → religion
Evil → radical evil
Exaltation → enthusiasm,
Pietism
Experience (sensibility)
Kant uses the notion ‘experience’ in two ways.
It means either (1) perception and what is given
through it, and that which is abstracted from
perceptions by means of induction, which is
the indispensable basis and necessary ground
of all empirical → knowledge (B1) or, far more
frequently, (2) the ‘correspondence of percep-
tions’ (Refl 2741) or ‘connected perceptions’
(B161) constituting such knowledge; experi-
ence in the latter sense is a necessary connec-
tion or synthesis of perceptions (A176=B218;
P 275 [§5]). For Kant, experience and knowl-
edge are inextricably bound up.
Although he admits that it may not be
immediately obvious, or recognized by some
of his modern predecessors, Kant holds that
202
‘experience [. . .] contains two very heteroge-
neous elements, namely a matter for cognition
from the senses and a certain form for order-
ing it from the inner source of pure intuiting
and thinking’ (A86=B118) (→ form).
On Kant’s view, without both these material
and formal conditions, an objective unity of rep-
resentations and thus experience, in the second
above-mentioned sense, itself is not possible.
Kant often talks about ‘possible experience’ (e.g.
B73, B127) or ‘the possibility of experience’,
which indicates that Kant’s main concern are
the conditions of possibility of both the expe-
rience of objects and the objects of experience
(B197=A158) rather than mere experience.
Kant believes that failure to recognize
this led philosophers such as → Locke and
→ Hume to mistaken positions regarding
the source of our concepts and our cogni-
tion. Locke and Hume fail to recognize that
there are formal conditions necessary for the
possibility of experience, as they think that
material conditions alone are sufficient to
produce experience. Kant believes that for
them ‘the senses do not merely afford us
impressions but also put them together, and
produce images of objects [. . .]’ (A120n.).
On this view, experience is something we
have independently of any subsequent actions
of either the understanding (→ judgment,
deduction) or → imagination. As a result
of failing to recognize that experience ‘is a
composite of that which we receive through
impressions and that which our own cognitive
faculty [. . .] provides out of itself’ (B1), Kant
believes that the empiricists are led to the con-
clusion that ultimately all of our concepts and
cognition have their source in our senses.
With a correct understanding of experi-
ence, however, Kant believes there is room
to hold that some of our concepts, such as
the pure concepts of understanding, are not
derived from the senses, but instead have

their source in the understanding itself. He
also believes that a proper understanding
of experience will enable him to explain the
possibility of synthetic a priori cognition – it
is rooted in the formal conditions of experi-
ence and so our synthetic a priori theoretical
cognition is grounded in what is required for
the possibility of experience.
Kant opposes the empiricist view (→
empiricism) that the senses not only provide
us with impressions, but also with the way
they are connected. One of Kant’s most fun-
damental assertions is that ‘the combination
(conjunctio) of a manifold in general can
never come to us through the senses’ (B129).
Instead, ‘all combination [. . .] is an action of
the understanding’ (B130).
As a result, according to Kant, ‘experi-
ence itself is a kind of cognition requiring the
understanding, whose rule I have to presup-
pose in myself before any object is given to
me, hence a priori’ (Bxvii). Experience is not
something simply given as a fact to which we
must then apply our understanding. Instead,
experience is only first made possible through
the synthetic activity (→ synthesis) of the
imagination and understanding.
Once the necessary contribution of the
understanding in the production of experi-
ence is recognized, however, it would none-
theless be a mistake to conclude on that basis
that experience can arise through the intel-
lect alone – this is a mistake Kant believes →
Leibniz was led into as a result of his intel-
lectualizing space and time. For sensibility is
also an essential component of experience.
In order to have experience at all, there
must be something to experience. As Kant
puts it, right at the beginning of the intro-
duction to CPR (B1), ‘[t]here is no doubt
whatever that all our cognition begins with
experience’, by means of which ‘the cogni-
tive faculty [is] awakened into exercise’.
203
Key Themes and Topics
The sense of experience meant here is the
above-mentioned first sense and concerns
the sensations of outer and inner sense (→
inner/outer sense) that are the matter of
experience.
It is also important to note, however, that
according to Kant, sensibility does not just
contribute to the material conditions of expe-
rience. For it is essential to realize that, along
with the pure concepts of understanding, the
pure forms of sensibility, i.e. space and time
(→ Transcendental Aesthetic), are a compo-
nent of the formal conditions of experience. In
order for sensations to be either outer or inner,
this already presupposes the representations
of respectively space and time (although being
sensations outer sensations are also always
in time). According to Kant, then, outer and
inner experience is only possible through the
representations of space and time.
The formal and material conditions
of experience play a crucial role in the →
Analogies of Experience and in the →
Postulates of Empirical Thinking in General
(A218=B265ff.). According to the first pos-
tulate, if something fits within the frame-
work of the formal conditions of experience,
then it is possible. According to the second
postulate, if something can be connected
with the material conditions of experi-
ence (i.e. with perception), then it is actual.
Finally, according to the third postulate, if
something ‘is determined through the con-
nection of perceptions in accordance with
concepts, then the object is called necessary’
(A234=B286–287). – SB
Further reading
S. M. Bayne, Kant on Causation. On the
Fivefold Routes to the Principle of
Causation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
2004), ch. 1.
Key Themes and Topics
A. Collins, Possible Experience.
Understanding Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1999).
H. Ginsborg, ‘Kant and the problem of
experience’, Philosophical Topics 34
(2006): 59–106.
Faith (historical, revealed,
rational) → religion
Fanaticism → Enthusiasm
Figurative synthesis → synthesis
Form, formal
Kant takes up the Aristotelian distinc-
tion between form and matter and gives it
a central place in his philosophy. Matter
is the determinable, form its determina-
tion (A266=B322); matter counts as the
given, form as ‘a manner of thinking of
that which is given’ (A279=B335). The
relation between form and matter is one of
the four pairs of concepts of reflection (→
Amphiboly). Kant claims that transcen-
dental reflection is ‘a duty’ for those who
want to ‘judge anything about things a
priori’ (A263=B319), and he further holds
that the concepts of form and matter are
inseparably ‘bound up with every use of
the understanding’, and ‘ground all other
reflection’ (A266=B322), so the form/
matter distinction can be taken to be the
fundamental operative tool of the Critical
philosophy.
In → logic, the matter (or content) of
a → judgment is its constituent concepts,
whereas the relation between the concepts
(as expressed by the copula) constitutes
204
the form of the judgment (A266=B322).
From the point of view of the understand-
ing, matter must precede form. In tran-
scendental reflection, this order is reversed.
Appearances are not things in themselves,
putatively cognized by the pure understand-
ing (→ transcendental idealism). Sensible
→ intuition is shown to have forms of its
own, and therefore ‘a formal intuition (of
space and time)’ (A268=B324) precedes the
matter of intuition (i.e. sensations). Forms
of intuition are thus a priori, and in general
the concept of form is closely linked to the
→ a priori.
With regard to the understanding, the
Table of Judgment maps its ‘mere form’
(A70=B95), and the corresponding catego-
ries are the forms for ‘thinking of an object
in general’ (A51=B75), or ‘the pure form
of the use of the understanding in regard
to objects in general’ (A248=B305). As
for reason, its demand for ‘absolute unity’
(A334=B391) leads to dialectical illusion
(→ Dialectic); its pure ideas can be taken
as forms without content. When critically
used, however, they serve as regulative
ideas, forming cognition into a → system,
under ‘the form of a whole’ (A832=B860)
(→ regulative principles).
Form and matter are also key concepts in
Kant’s practical philosophy. Practical univer-
sal laws determine the → will ‘not by their
matter but only by their form’ (CPrR 27).
Only the lawgiving form of the maxim is
moral, whereas a will determined by the mat-
ter of its maxim (e.g. one’s own happiness) is
in opposition to the principle of → morality
(CPrR 25).
In aesthetics, the judgment of taste is
formal. Beauty concerns the form of the
object (CJ 279). A judgment that asserts the
agreeableness of an object is a judgment of
sense (a ‘material aesthetic judgment’), not

a judgment of taste (CJ 223) (→ aesthetic
judgment). – MQ
Further Reading
R. Pippin, Kant’s Theory of Form (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
Forms of intuition (pure
intuition) → INTUITION
Freedom
Kant conceives of freedom primarily in terms
of the autonomy, or self-legislation, of the
will. By → will he means one’s ability to act
for reasons and he considers autonomy to
consist in taking this ability itself – whether
one’s own or others’ – as a reason for action.
He also thinks that this autonomy coincides
with moral goodness, such that an autono-
mous will is also a ‘good will’.
He emphasizes these claims in presenting
his basic understanding of → morality in G
and particularly with his formulas of the end
in itself and autonomy. The formula of the
end in itself describes a morally good action
as one done considering each affected agent as
an ‘end in itself’ (→ kingdom of ends) – that is,
as something of such value that he or she may
not be used merely as a ‘thing’ or a ‘means’ for
satisfying one’s own or others’ inclinations.
The examples that he gives in presenting
this formula show that, for Kant, to con-
sider each affected agent as an end in itself
is to consider each affected agent’s will as
itself providing reasons to do or refrain from
action  – as when one refrains from mak-
ing false promises because others could not
consent to this, helps others to get what they
want because they consider these things to
205
Key Themes and Topics
make them happy or cultivates one’s own
skills because this improves one’s own ability
to act for reasons (G 428–430).
The formula of autonomy emphasizes
that one’s will is thus autonomous, or self-
legislating, in the sense that the reasons for
which one acts fundamentally concern only
the will, something which one appreciates
simply as and because one is a will, rather
than for other, contingent reasons (G 431–
433; CPrR 33–41).
Kant considers the will’s autonomy also to
presuppose the will’s freedom in the sense of
its being undetermined by antecedent causes.
He appeals to his → transcendental idealism
to claim that we need not consider ourselves
merely as objects of possible experience, sub-
ject to determination by antecedent causes,
and that we may consider, if not experience,
ourselves otherwise. He also argues that in
acting according to moral reasons, and so
achieving autonomy, the will causes actions
in a way that differs from that of antecedent
causes of changes in the objects of possible
experience and is thus underdetermined by
such causes (CPrR 28–29; G 450).
In some passages, he also argues that
this freedom is manifested in a variety of
other ways – in acting for reasons, whether
moral or not (A532–534=B560–562, A800–
803=B828–831; P 344–347; G 455–457),
in producing ‘ideas’ (→ idea, ideas) that go
beyond the objects of possible experience (G
447–463), or in being responsible for actions
in the sense of their being within one’s ‘con-
trol’ (CPrR 94–100)  – and in G he argues
that this freedom implies the will’s autonomy,
since the only alternative to determination by
antecedent causes is such moral self-determi-
nation (G 446–447) (→ spontaneity). But
in CPrR he insists that this freedom must
be considered simply as a presupposition
of autonomy and cannot be demonstrated
Key Themes and Topics
independently (CPrR 3–7, 28–33, 42–56,
93–99, 103–106).
Kant also provides an account of politi-
cal freedom, particularly in MM. He dis-
tinguishes this freedom from the autonomy
of the will on the grounds that politics, or
justice, concerns only what can be coerced
by others and is therefore a matter only of
actions and not of the reasons for which we
do them. He claims that we each have a basic
right not to be coerced, but only insofar as
this is consistent with everyone else’s equal
freedom of action – thus, he claims, coercion
can be justified to protect such freedom (MM
214, 218–221, 230–233, 237–239).
In MM he proceeds to argue for a range
of freedoms in this sense, from the property
and family rights of individuals to the legis-
lative and international rights of states (→
right). Elsewhere, he also limits his specula-
tions about human progress to such freedoms,
on the grounds that while natural and social
circumstances may make our actions more
just, autonomy can be achieved only by the
will itself (UH 21–29; CBH 118–126; CJ
359–445; TP 310–312; PP 360–361, 365,
366). – TB
Further Reading
H. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990).
H. Allison, ‘Kant on freedom of the will’,
in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Kant and Modern
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), pp. 381–415
K. Flikschuh, Kant and Modern Political
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000).
A. Reath, ‘Kant’s Critical account of
freedom’, in G. Bird (ed.), A Companion
206
to Kant (Malden, MA/Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010), pp. 275–290.
Geometry
Geometry is the body of synthetic a priori
knowledge whose validity is guaranteed by
the status of → a priori → intuition conferred
upon the representation of space by Kant
(B40–42) (→ Transcendental Aesthetic). As
Kant explains, geometry’s a priori status is
not analytic (B16), but involves the exhibi-
tion of concepts through a priori intuitions
(A714=B743). That the shortest line between
two points is the straight line does not follow
from an → analysis of the concept ‘straight’.
It requires an ostensive construction in pure
intuition whereby the → synthesis of the gen-
erated manifold is brought under geomet-
ric concepts according to the categories of
quantity.
If carried out empirically (e.g. on paper),
this construction generates a particular
object which must however serve ‘to express
the concept without damage to its univer-
sality’ (A714=B742). Since ‘[n]o image of a
triangle would ever be adequate to the con-
cept of it’ (A141=B180), what is therefore
at stake is the construction of a concept in
pure intuition (A714=B742), i.e. the schema
(A141=B180) (→ schematism). This notion
of schema allows Kant to avoid the temp-
tation of mathematical realism: there is no
intuition of a universal, but the universal
is exhibited through the construction of an
instance of the formal intuition of a particu-
lar (A714=B742).
Kant’s geometry is Euclidean (cf. Refl 9).
Historically, this view is not surprising. In the
nineteenth century, hyperbolic (Lobachevsky)
and elliptic (Riemann) geometries were

developed, which deny Euclid’s fifth postu-
late. Whereas in Euclidean geometry there
is one and only one line parallel to a given
straight line and passing through a point
external to it, in hyperbolic geometry there
are infinitely many such parallel lines, and in
elliptic geometry there are none.
Some commentators view Kant’s pro-
nouncement on the logical possibility of
denying fundamental mathematical proposi-
tions (B14) as creating the conceptual space
for non-Euclidean geometry. Others see his
geometry as necessarily Euclidean insofar as
geometric results are obtained by construc-
tion in space, and such constructions are
Euclidean. While the former view generally
mistakenly sees Kant as a forerunner of axi-
omatic geometry, the latter overlooks the dis-
tinction between space as form of intuition
and as geometrical space.
Two observations are useful with regard to
the issue of Kant and non-Euclidean geom-
etry. First, Kantian examples of Euclidean
plane geometry (A717ff.=B745ff.) easily let
us overlook the distinction between geo-
metrical image and a priori spatial intuition.
The latter is a transcendental condition of
spatial images which instantiate it. But the
actual generation of images involves empiri-
cal conditions connected with the specificity
of our perceptual apparatus, and this may
explain the Euclidean framework’s privi-
leged status.
The suggestion is therefore that the fact
that our images are Euclidean is ultimately
a feature of our perception that is related to
our embodiment in space, and to the conven-
tion of how to formalize it. It is therefore
not a priori, thus distinguishing a posteriori
applied geometry from a priori pure geome-
try. This does not involve the mistaken claim
that our perceptual geometry is Euclidean,
but rather the observation that Euclidean
207
Key Themes and Topics
geometry is a particularly suitable conven-
tional choice, e.g. according to a criterion of
simplicity.
Second, this would leave us with the pos-
sibility of other ways of intuiting non-Eucli-
dean figures, e.g. by making use of models of
elliptic and hyperbolic geometry in Euclidean
space. This would amount to different ways
of schematizing geometrical concepts than
suggested at A141=B180. The resulting for-
mal intuitions would represent non-Eucli-
dean geometrical concepts; the generated
images are both Euclidean and ostensive con-
structions (under the selected model). Such
constructions share properties with both
Kant’s ostensive and symbolic constructions
(A717=B745) (→ mathematics).
Our formal intuition of perceptual space
is three-dimensional, and this feature is
important for Kant’s interest in incongruent
counterparts. Kant first discusses them in the
pre-Critical essay DS (1768), which argues
against → Leibniz’s relational view of space.
According to Kant, counterparts such as the
right and the left hand are spatial objects for
which all internal relations are identical, but
which are not superposable. That is to say, it
is not possible to turn the one into the other
using a rigid continuous transformation.
Kant’s argument successfully shows that
this property of incongruence depends upon
the nature of space as a whole. Kant con-
cludes that this invalidates the Leibnizian
relational theory of space. In ID (1770), Kant
examines the epistemological implications of
this conclusion. Knowledge of space cannot
be intellectual: sensibility does not therefore
provide a confused type of knowledge, but is
rather a distinct source of cognition.
The Critical Kant concludes (A283=B339)
that, since the relational properties of things in
themselves must only be dependent upon their
intrinsic properties, spatial objects are not
Key Themes and Topics
things in themselves. This provides grounds
for his much discussed claim that ‘[s]pace
does not represent any property of things in
themselves, nor does it represent them in their
relation to one another’ (A26=B42), and thus
addresses the famous ‘neglected alternative’ of
the proof of → transcendental idealism in the
Transcendental Aesthetic. – CO
Further Reading
M. Friedman, ‘Geometry, construction and
intuition in Kant and his successors’,
in G. Sher, R. Tieszen (eds), Between
Logic and Intuition. Essays in Honor of
Charles Parsons (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), pp. 186–218.
F. Kjosavik, ‘Kant on geometrical intuition
and the foundations of mathematics,
Kant-Studien 100,1 (2009): 1–27.
A. Moretto, ‘Philosophie transcendantale et
géométrie non-euclidienne’, in Kant et les
Mathématiques, in the series Les Cahiers
philosophiques de Strasbourg 26 (2009):
117–140.
H. Poincaré, ‘On the foundations of
geometry’, in W. Ewald (ed.), From Kant to
Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations
of Mathematics, vol. II (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), pp. 982–1011.
L. Shabel, ‘Kant’s argument from geometry’,
Journal of the History of Philosophy 42,2
(2004): 195–215.
God → proofs of the
existence of God
Good → morality
Good will → will
208
Guiding thread → deduction
Happiness → morality, religion,
virtue/virtues
Highest good → religion,
morality
I think → apperception
Idea, ideas
In CPR, Kant’s concept of an idea (Idee or
Vernunftbegriff) is exclusively linked to pure
→ reason and its concepts, just like the concept
of a category (Kategorie or Verstandesbegriff)
is linked to the understanding and the concept
of an intuition (Anschauuung) to sensibility,
and chiefly discussed in the first book of the →
Dialectic (‘On the concepts of pure reason’).
The overall objective of this theoretical
discussion of pure reason’s ideas is clearly
to ground and secure the system of practical
philosophy, namely
that of making the terrain for these majes-
tic moral edifices level and firm enough
to be built upon; for under this ground
there are all sorts of passageways [. . .]
left over from reason’s vain but confident
treasure hunting, that make every build-
ing insecure. It is the transcendental use
of pure reason, of its principles and ideas,
whose closer acquaintance we are [. . .]
obligated to make, in order properly to
determine and evaluate the influence and
the worth of pure reason. (B375–376)
For these reasons, it is already on the theoret-
ical level that Kant gives a positive account
or regulative defence of the transcendental –
not the (illegitimate) transcendent  – use of
pure reason, that is, its transcendental ideas
and its system of transcendental ideas. One

interesting formulation of this account or
defence goes as follows:
[T]he pure rational concepts [Vernunft­
begriffe] of the totality in a synthesis of
conditions are necessary at least as prob-
lems of extending the unity of the under-
standing, if possible, to the unconditioned,
and they are grounded in the nature of
human reason, even if these transcenden-
tal concepts lack a suitable use in concreto
and have no other utility than to point
the understanding in the right direction
so that it may be thoroughly consistent
with itself when it extends itself to its
uttermost extremes. (B380)
Generally speaking, transcendental ideas
have to do with ‘the unconditioned synthetic
unity of all conditions in general’ for reasons
of heuristics and consistency, but Kant speci-
fies that they can be brought ‘under three
classes, of which the first contains the abso-
lute (unconditioned) unity of the thinking
subject, the second the absolute unity of the
series of conditions of appearance, the third
the absolute unity of the condition of all
objects of thought in general’, so that ‘pure
reason provides the ideas for a transcenden-
tal doctrine of the soul (psychologia rationa-
lis), a transcendental science of the world
(cosmologia rationalis), and [. . .] a transcen-
dental cognition of God (theologia transcen-
dentalis)’ (B391–392). And it is by means of
this tripartite classification of progressively
unifying ideas – soul, world and God – that
pure reason brings all its cognitions into a →
system.
However, two important characteristics of
Kant’s theory of ideas should be stressed.
First, there is no objective deduction of
these transcendental ideas possible, such as
in the case of the categories (→ deduction),
since ideas are not related to any object that
209
Key Themes and Topics
could be given corresponding to them; the
only applicable method of demonstrating
the legitimate function of transcendental
ideas seems to be ‘a subjective introduction
[Anleitung] to them from the nature of our
reason’ since the transcendental ideas serve
only for ‘ascending [Aufsteigen] in the series
of conditions to the unconditioned, i.e., to
the principles’ (B393–394).
Secondly, Kant’s conception of a system of
ideas is developed from his theory of judg-
ment, similar to the way he proceeds in the
Deduction, namely through a differentiation
of the different types of relation between sub-
ject and predicate in a judgment of reason:
There will be as many concepts of reason
[Vernunftbegriffe] as there are species of
relation represented by the understand-
ing by means of the categories; and so
we must seek an unconditioned, first,
for the categorical synthesis in a sub-
ject, second for the hypothetical syn-
thesis of the members of a series, and
third for the disjunctive synthesis of the
parts in a system. There are [. . .] just as
many species of syllogism [Arten von
Vernunftschlüssen], and in each of them
prosyllogisms proceed to the uncondi-
tioned: one, to a subject that is no longer
a predicate, another to a presupposition
that presupposes nothing further, and
the third to an aggregate of members of
a division such that nothing further is
required for it to complete the division
of a concept. (B379–380)
This judgment-oriented way of Kant’s argu-
mentation can hardly be underestimated
since it is in terms of the dialectical inferences
of pure reason that the → Paralogisms, →
the Antinomies, the Ideal of Pure Reason (→
transcendental ideal) and most of the other
issues of the Dialectic are discussed. – JV
Key Themes and Topics
Further Reading
N. Klimmek, Kants System der
transzendentalen Ideen (Berlin/New York:
de Gruyter, 2005).
M. Rohlf, ‘The Ideas of Pure Reason’,
in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Kant’s ‘Critique of
Pure Reason’ (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), pp. 190–209.
Idealism → transcendental
idealism
Identity
Kant sometimes characterizes the distinction
between analytic and synthetic judgments
in terms of identity: in affirmative analytic
judgments ‘the connection of the predicate
with the subject is thought through identity’,
whereas judgments ‘in which this connection
is thought without identity are to be called
synthetic’ (A7=B10–11; trans. amended)
(→ judgment). This means that the marks
contained in the predicate concept of an
analytic judgment are identical to (some of)
those in the subject concept (→ analysis).
Such comparison of the contents of concepts
rests on reflection: ‘identity and difference’ is
one of the four pairs of concepts of reflection
(A261=B317) (→ Amphiboly).
Kant employs transcendental reflection,
which locates the cognitive source of a rep-
resentation, for criticizing the Leibnizian
principle of the identity of indiscernibles.
According to → Leibniz, two concepts with
the same internal determinations are identical,
and since he ‘believed himself able to cognize
the inner constitution of things by comparing
all objects only with the understanding and
210
the abstract formal concepts of its thinking’
(A270=B326), he concluded that things with
identical conceptual determinations must be
numerically identical. Through transcenden-
tal reflection, Kant by contrast distinguishes
between concepts and intuitions. Sensible
objects have spatiotemporal locations, which
cannot be derived from their conceptual
determinations. Therefore, two things can
be ‘fully similar and equal’ to each other and
yet occupy different places, as the parts of
space are ‘entirely indifferent with regard
to the inner determinations of the things’
(A272=B328). The principle of the identity
of indiscernibles, though valid for concepts,
is thus ‘no law of nature’ (A272=B328).
Kant also discusses identity in connection
with → apperception. The possibility to think
a concept, i.e. an identical feature in different
representations (analytical unity), depends on
the synthetic unity of consciousness (→ syn-
thesis). Identity among representations thus
requires that the manifold is united, i.e. ‘the
analytical unity of apperception is only possi-
ble under the presupposition of some synthetic
one’ (B133). Without this original synthetic
apperception ‘I would have as multicolored,
diverse a self as I have representations’ (B134);
it therefore grounds the ‘thoroughgoing iden-
tity of self-consciousness’ (B135).
In the section on the → Paralogisms in
CPR, Kant criticizes the rationalist doctrine
of the thinking subject as a simple substance.
The apperceptive identity of consciousness
cannot prove the ‘identity of person’ (A365)
pertaining to a noumenal substance. – MQ
Further Reading
K. Ameriks, Kant’s Theory of Mind. An
Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure
Reason, new edition (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2000), ch. 4.

Imagination
In the mid-1770s, Kant includes the faculty of
imagination (das Vermögen der Einbildung)
among the six faculties (illustration, imita-
tion, anticipation, correlation, imagination
and cultivation) of the formative faculty
(Bildungsvermögen), ‘which is a faculty for
making out of ourselves cognitions which in
themselves nevertheless have the form according
to which objects would affect our senses’ (LM
235). The faculty of imagination in particular ‘is
the faculty for producing images from oneself,
independent of the actuality of objects, where
the images are not borrowed from experience’
(LM 237). This formative faculty as a whole
Kant locates within sensibility (Sinnlichkeit), the
lower faculty of cognition, which he in turn dis-
tinguishes from ‘the higher faculty of cognition,
[which] is threefold: understanding [Verstand],
power of judgment [Urtheilskraft], and reason
[Vernunft]’ (LM 241).
By the time of CPR, the imagination’s
location within the faculties of cognition has
changed. Instead of placing imagination within
sensibility, Kant now holds that ‘sense, imagi-
nation, and apperception’ are the ‘three origi-
nal sources (capacities or faculties of the soul),
which contain the conditions of the possibility
of all experience, and cannot themselves be
derived from any other faculty of the mind’
(A94).
Imagination is contrasted with sensibility
in that whereas sensibility is ‘the receptivity
of our mind to receive representations inso-
far as it is affected in some way’ (A51=B75),
imagination (i.e. productive imagination)
involves → spontaneity and it is an active
‘faculty for determining the sensibility
a priori’ (B151–152). Imagination is also
contrasted with understanding in that while
both are active faculties involving spontane-
ity, understanding enacts an intellectual →
211
Key Themes and Topics
synthesis whereas imagination enacts a figu-
rative synthesis.
Heidegger has famously argued in his
Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik that
imagination is not simply one faculty among
equals (see the essay on Heidegger in the sec-
tion ‘Reception and Influence’, this volume).
Instead, according to Heidegger, the tran-
scendental power of imagination is the com-
mon root Kant writes about when he tells us
that ‘there are two stems of human cognition,
which may perhaps arise from a common but
to us unknown root, namely sensibility and
understanding [. . .]’ (A15=B29).
In CPR, the function of the imagination
has also been transformed. Image formation
is still part of the role of imagination and it
is still true that ‘[i]magination is the faculty
for representing an object even without its
presence in intuition’ (B151), but a crucial
addition to the role of imagination is the
function of synthesis. Kant writes that ‘[s]
ynthesis in general is [. . .] the mere effect of
the imagination, of a blind though indispen-
sable function of the soul, without which we
would have no cognition at all, but of which
we are seldom even conscious’ (A78=B103).
The synthesis of the imagination is a figu-
rative synthesis that can either be a priori or
empirical. When discussing the a priori syn-
thesis of imagination, Kant typically calls it the
productive imagination. When this productive
imagination is aimed at determining the form
of sensibility a priori in accordance with the
unity of apperception, this is called the tran-
scendental synthesis of imagination and is as
such necessary for the possibility of experi-
ence (e.g. A123; B151–152). The synthesis
of the reproductive imagination, however, ‘is
subject solely to empirical laws, namely those
of association, and that therefore contributes
nothing to the explanation of the possibility
of cognition a priori [. . .]’ (B152).
Key Themes and Topics
In the Critical period, Kant also calls the
imagination the faculty of presentation (das
Vermögen der Darstellung) (see e.g. CJ 232,
and CJ 244–245). In CPR this function of the
imagination takes prominence in the chapter
‘On the Schematism’ (→ schematism), where
Kant explains, for the case of determinative
→ judgment, the general procedure by which
imagination exhibits a determinate concept
in intuition. In the case of → aesthetic judg-
ment, which is a merely reflective rather
than determinative judgment, however, Kant
holds that imagination is not constrained by
the understanding to exhibit a determinate
concept, but instead the imagination is free
and ‘it schematizes without a concept’ (CJ
287). The satisfaction of these judgments is
not grounded on intuitions being subsumed
under a concept, but instead it is grounded on
a feeling that arises when the free play of the
imagination ‘is in harmony with the [under-
standing] in its lawfulness’ (CJ 287). – SB
Further Reading
G. Banham, Kant’s Transcendental
Imagination (Basingstoke/New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
J. Kneller, Kant and the Power of
Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007).
R. Makkreel, Imagination and
Interpretation in Kant. The
Hermeneutical Import of the Critique
of Judgment (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990).
J. M. Young, ‘Kant’s view of the imagination’,
Kant-Studien 79 (1988): 140–164.
Immaturity (Unmündigkeit) →
Enlightenment
212
Imperative → categorical
imperative
Inclination → duty/duties,
morality, will
Incongruent counterparts →
geometry
Inner/outer sense
Kant’s notion of sensibility is divided into
inner sense and outer sense. Outer sense
is that by means of which ‘we represent to
ourselves objects as outside us, and all as in
space’ (B37). Inner sense is that ‘by means
of which the mind intuits itself, or its inner
state’ (ibid.). However, while intuiting itself
the mind does not thereby have an intui-
tion of the soul as a determinate object (→
Paralogisms); this marks out a major dif-
ference between Kant and his predecessors
regarding self-consciousness. A distinction
must be made between the self that intuits
itself in terms of being self-consciously aware
of one’s representing and the self that puta-
tively determines the substance underlying
one’s representing.
Outer sense is a formal designation that
makes it possible to regard ‘certain sensa-
tions to be related to something outside me’
(B38), that is, to represent those sensations
being related such as to constitute reference
to an external spatial object. The pure form
of outer sense is space, which ‘comprehends
all things that may appear to us externally’
(B43) (→ Transcendental Aesthetic).
Inner sense is in some sense more fun-
damental than outer sense. The → form of
inner sense is time, which is therefore the
form of all appearances (B51), whereas
space is only the form of outer appearances.
In other words, all representations, whether

of inner or outer ‘objects’, belong to the
mind and thus to inner sense. Time, Kant
says, is the ‘immediate condition of the
inner intuition (of our souls), and thereby
also the mediate condition of outer appear-
ances’ (B50=A34). However, the represen-
tations of outer sense ‘make up the proper
material with which we occupy our mind’
(B67). They are the actual matter of all our
representations.
The → form of → intuition is, Kant tells
us, nothing other than ‘the way in which the
mind is affected by its own activity’, that is,
‘affected through itself’ (B67–68) and this
makes it an inner sense (B68). The subject
as → appearance is the object of this inner
sense (B68), not the subject as its own self-
activity. But the question is ‘how a subject
can internally intuit itself’ (ibid.). Kant notes
that → apperception or self-consciousness is
only a simple representation through which
nothing manifold is given; if a manifold were
given in it, then the inner intuition would be
intellectual and would be identical to apper-
ception. But as apperception is merely sim-
ple, ‘an inner perception of the manifold that
is antecedently given in the subject’ (B68),
independently of the spontaneity of the
mind, is required. This justifies the distinc-
tion between self-consciousness as spontane-
ous self-activity (→ spontaneity) and the way
the mind is affected by it in inner sense, and
is thus passive.
At B153ff. Kant reiterates the argument
from B68 and notices that it might strike one
as paradoxical that we only intuit ourselves
‘as we are internally affected’ by ourselves.
How can the same ‘I’ be both passive and
active?
To explain this, Kant again sharply discrim-
inates between inner sense and apperception.
The function of apperception, the activity of
the understanding, is not a faculty of intuition
213
Key Themes and Topics
but merely a function of unity among one’s
representations in an intuition that is given to
it. Apperception, ‘under the designation of a
transcendental synthesis of the imagination’,
‘exercises that action on the passive subject’
(B153). The inner sense, which is mere form
of intuition, containing no synthetic unity, is
in this way affected by the act of appercep-
tion, which combines and hence determines
the manifold in inner sense.
Inner sense is also central to the argument
of the → Refutation of Idealism, where Kant
attempts to undermine the ostensible threat
of idealism, and which continues to occupy
Kant’s mind afterwards, judging by the
numerous Reflexionen that Kant wrote in
the years after the publication of the second
edition of CPR, which reflect on the problem
of idealism (see esp. Refl 5655 and LenFr in
relation to inner sense). – DS
Further Reading
H. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.
An Interpretation and Defense, revised
& enlarged edition (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004), ch. 10, pt. I.
G. Mohr, Das sinnliche Ich. Innerer Sinn
und Bewußtsein bei Kant (Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 1991).
Intellect → judgment
(understanding)
Intellectual synthesis →
synthesis
Interest
For Kant, the notion of ‘interest’ is of impor-
tance in a variety of contexts. Most generally,
Key Themes and Topics
interest drives a finite rational agent towards an
end: it is the ‘dependence of a contingently deter-
minable will on principles of reason’ (G 413n;
see also G 460n, MM 212, CJ 204, 207).
By way of a deep-seated analogy, Kant
speaks of the interests of our faculties: ‘Reason,
as the faculty of principles, determines the inter-
est of all the powers of the mind but itself deter-
mines its own’ (CPrR 119–120). → Reason is
by nature architectonic; its most fundamental
end is to discover an absolute foundation for →
knowledge (A474ff.=B502ff.) (→ system). This
speculative interest leads it uncritically to claim
knowledge of what lies beyond the bounds of →
experience, in particular, to the → Paralogisms,
→ Antinomies and → proofs of the existence
of God (A340ff.=B398ff.). However, the psy-
chological, cosmological and theological ideas
do have a necessary regulative role in leading
reason towards systematic unity (A671=B699)
(→ regulative principles, system).
The discussion of the conditions and limits
of knowledge answers the first of the three
questions that unite all interests of reason: ‘1.
What can I know? 2. What should I do? 3.
What may I hope?’ (A805=B833). The sec-
ond question is answered by moral theory
(→ morality); it does not lead reason beyond
its bounds. The third reveals that its practical
interest reaches farther than the theoretical.
The moral imperative cannot be separated
from the hope for happiness and thus from
the belief that a wise creator rewards moral-
ity and that the striving for it is endless (CPrR
122–132). Theoretical reason cannot prove
moral → freedom, God’s existence or the
soul’s immortality. Reason’s interest is ‘com-
plete in practical use alone’ (CPrR 121).
Central to Kant’s practical philosophy is
the distinction between pathological interests
in natural ends that satisfy desires and a pure
moral interest that is simply the feeling of
‘respect for the law’ (G 401n). However, it is
214
far from easy to comprehend the interest that
explains the legislation of an autonomous
will and the role that the feeling of respect
plays in moral agency (CPrR 71–89, esp.
79–81; see also MM 399–403) (→ categori-
cal imperative). Were a sceptic to ask us why
morality has ‘a worth so great that there can
be no higher interest anywhere [. . .] we could
give him no satisfactory answer’ (G 449ff.;
cf. G 459–463). Kant’s ultimate answer seems
simply to be that the law interests us because
it arises ‘from our proper self’ (G 461).
Kant lays great emphasis on the claim
that judgments of taste are disinterested (CJ
203–205) (→ aesthetic judgment). Although
they are expressions of pleasure, it is neither
merely sensual nor moral (CJ 205–211).
Finding a thing beautiful (or → sublime) is
‘merely contemplative, i.e., a judgment [. . .]
indifferent with regard to the existence of an
object [. . .]’ (CJ 209). Nevertheless, it is ‘also
not directed to concepts; for the judgment of
taste is not a cognitive judgment [. . .]’ (CJ
209). Aesthetic judgment expresses pleasure
in the interaction of our mental faculties.
From the disinterestedness of aesthetic judg-
ments follows their claim to universality (CJ
211–212) and the difficulty of judging objects
purely aesthetically. Though aesthetic judg-
ments are essentially disinterested, the beauty
of → art promotes our natural interest in socia-
bility and finding nature beautiful is a mark of
interest in the good (CJ 296–303). – IG
Intuition
The term ‘intuition’ (Anschauung), whose
Latin cognates are already introduced by
Kant in ID (387, 396, 402–403) to differen-
tiate a sensible form of → knowledge that
is irreducible to intellectual (conceptual)

knowledge, denotes a direct reference to a
particular or → object, which cannot be cap-
tured by a concept. In Kant’s theory of con-
cepts (→ logic), a concept is always a general
or universal → representation, never a repre-
sentation of a singular thing. An intuition is
‘immediately related to the object and is sin-
gular’, whereas a concept is always ‘mediate,
by means of a mark, which can be common
to several things’ (A320=B377; cf. A19=B33;
ID 396). ‘That representation [ . . . ] which can
only be given through a single object, is an
intuition’ (B47=A32). Hence, unlike concepts
an intuition is not a discursive representa-
tion, which can be represented of a plurality
of objects. Only by means of sensibility can
intuitions, through which alone objects can
be presented to us, be given.
Three criteria for intuitions can be iden-
tified: (1) the immediacy criterion; (2) the
singularity criterion; and (3) the dependency
criterion.
The first criterion concerns the above-
noted aspect of the direct relation of an intui-
tion to its object, unlike a concept, which is
only indirectly related to an object by means
of other concepts or by means of an intuition
(A68=B93). The second aspect, as noted, indi-
cates that an intuition picks out a particular.
The third concerns an often ignored element,
namely the fact that intuitions only exist on
the basis of a given object. An intuition ‘takes
place only insofar as the object is given to
us’ (A19=B33). That is, the existence of an
intuition is dependent on the existence of an
object (i.e. an as yet undetermined object or
appearance) (B72; P 281). By contrast, a con-
cept need not depend on an actually existing
object (the concept of a unicorn, say).
While Kant sharply distinguishes between
intuitions and concepts, whose roles must not
be mixed up (A52=B76), he also importantly
argues for their necessary connection to the
215
Key Themes and Topics
extent that knowledge should arise from it;
Kant famously says that intuitions without
concepts are blind, and that concepts with-
out intuitions are empty (A51=B75). This
dictum in fact conveys the idea that only
intuitions are the means by which empirical
content is provided – that is, that an immedi-
ate relation to the perceived object by way of
sensations is established – whereas concepts
are the forms necessary to objectively deter-
mine this content.
Nevertheless, intuitions are not just
empirical content, but also have a necessary
→ form. Hence, Kant distinguishes between
→ pure and empirical intuition, where the
former is the necessary form of the lat-
ter. An intuition is empirical if it contains a
manifold of sensations, which is the matter
of an intuition. Furthermore, the object of
an empirical intuition is an → appearance.
On the other hand, ‘pure intuition contains
merely the form under which something is
intuited’ (A50=B74), and is → a priori. Pure
intuition is the ‘pure form of sensibility’
(A20–21=B34–35), and contains nothing but
relations (B66–67).
The two pure intuitions at the centre of
Kant’s argument in the → Transcendental
Aesthetic are space and time (B38–40,
46–47). Already in ID, published eleven
years prior to CPR, it is argued that space
(as well as time) is a pure intuition and is
the ‘very form of all sensory intuition’ (ID
402–403). Space and time are the ‘formal
principle[s] of our intuition’, i.e. ‘the condi-
tion under which something can the object of
our senses’, hence the ‘condition of sensitive
cognition’ (ID 396). Space and time as mere
forms of intuition become formal intuitions
– and so objects in their own right, which in
the case of space can be studied in → geom-
etry – under the influence of the → synthesis
of the → imagination (B160–1n.).
Key Themes and Topics
It should be noted that an intuition is not
a single representation or a sensation, but an
objective perception (B376–377=A320; LM
484). One can have an intuition of an object,
without needing a concept or the capacity to
judge (A89–91=B122–123; JL 33). However,
for an intuition to refer objectively in the
strict sense, a synthesis of the imagination
is required, which is not given in the mani-
fold itself (B129–131; B134; B151–152);
and without thinking, ‘mere intuition’ does
not yet constitute a real relation to an object
(B309; cf. A111). An intuition gives us the
object, with the understanding it is thought,
that is, subsumed under concepts in judge-
ments. An intuition is a necessary condition,
though not a sufficient condition for objec-
tive knowledge. It is then the argument of the
Transcendental Deduction of the categories
(→ deduction) to argue that intuition and
concept must be combined to establish the
possibility of objective → experience.
For Kant, intuition is always sensible and
hence passive (ID 396); unlike for the German
idealists, who were intrigued by Kant’s sug-
gestion of the possibility of an ‘intuitive
understanding’ which is active and original
(CJ 406), for Kant intellectual intuition is not
a possible way of intuiting for human beings.
Intellectual intuition is a mode of original intui-
tion, ‘through which the existence of the object
of intuition is itself given’ (B72), whereas by
contrast sensible intuition is dependent on an
already given object through the manifold of
representations that are affected by it. At vari-
ous places in the Transcendental Deduction
and elsewhere (B135; B138–139; B145; B159;
A230=B283; cf. CJ 402–403, 405–406), Kant
explicitly contrasts sensible and intellectual
intuition to point out the incontrovertibly
discursive, non-intuitive nature of our, human
mode of conceptual cognition, which requires
the receptivity of sensible representations
216
in order to relate to objects (A19=B33;
B298=A239). – DS
Further Reading
L. Allais, ‘Kant, non-conceptual content and
the representation of space’, Journal of
the History of Philosophy 47,3 (2009):
383–413.
L. Falkenstein, Kant’s Intuitionism: A
Commentary on the Transcendental
Aesthetic (Toronto: Toronto University
Press, 1995), Part I.
S. Grüne, Blinde Anschauung. Die Rolle
von Begriffen in Kants Theorie sinnlicher
Synthesis (Frankfurt a/M: Klostermann,
2009).
Judgment (understanding)
The notion of judgment forms the backbone
of Kant’s philosophy. It is a central concept
of both CPR and CJ. At A132=B171, Kant
distinguishes between, on the one hand, the
understanding ‘as the faculty of rules’ and,
on the other hand, ‘the power of judgment
[Urteilskraft]’ as ‘the faculty of subsuming
under rules’. However, Kant also appears
to define the understanding as a ‘faculty for
judging’ (A69=B94). This is so because he
takes the understanding to be a faculty for
thinking, which means that it is a way of
cognizing through concepts. And given that
concepts rest on functions, by which Kant
means ‘the unity of the action of ordering
different representations under a common
one’ (A68=B93), and given that ‘the under-
standing can make no other use of these
concepts than that of judging by means of
them’ (ibid.) – i.e. concepts are ‘predicates of
possible judgments’ (A69=B94)  – an act of

the understanding, or act of thought, comes
down to an act of judgment, defined as the
capacity to subsume under rules. ‘Therefore,
thinking is the same as judging’ (P 304).
This analysis forms the basis of Kant’s
claim in the guiding thread (A79=B104–
105) that ‘[t]he same function [i.e. ‘the same
understanding’, D.S.] that gives unity to the
different representations in a judgment also
gives unity to the mere synthesis of differ-
ent representations in an intuition’, which
yields the pure concepts of the understand-
ing, the categories (→ deduction, synthesis).
That is to say, the elementary functions for
judgment, which are listed in the Table of
Judgment, correspond in a strong sense to
the pure concepts by means of which the
connection between the understanding and a
determinate → object is made possible.
The elementary functions for judgments
are what, apart from the modal forms,
makes up the content of a paradigmatic
subject–predicate judgment. The quantita-
tive moments concern the predicate of a
judgment being attributed to either all, some
or a particular thing(s) that are/is subsumed
under the subject. The qualitative moments
relate to whether the copula in a judgment is
affirmative, negative or infinite. Furthermore,
a judgment is characterized by three possible
relations among its predicates: either it is cat-
egorical, hypothetical or disjunctive.
These elementary unitary forms corre-
spond to the categories being those very
same forms in respect of their relation to
the intuition of an object. This is why Kant
identifies, at a crucial stage in the argument
in the Transcendental Deduction (§19) (→
deduction, object), a judgment as ‘nothing
other than the way to bring given cogni-
tions to the objective unity of apperception’
(B141; cf. MFNS 476n. and Refl 5933), i.e.
the way that by means of the concepts of the
217
Key Themes and Topics
understanding (the categories) predicates are
related such that they refer to a determinate
object of intuition that is subsumed under the
subject predicate. As Kant is reported to have
said in LL 928: ‘A judgment is the representa-
tion of the way that concepts belong to one
consciousness universally[,] objectively.’
In FI and CJ, Kant makes a distinction
between a ‘determinative’ judgment and a
‘merely reflecting’ judgment, corresponding to
the determining and reflecting powers of judg-
ment respectively (FI 211; cf. CJ 179). For Kant,
this distinction is important for arguing for the
possibility of finding among the multiplicity
of the empirical objects of nature a common
ground for their unity and arriving at empirical
concepts and their thorough interconnection
into empirical laws. Other than with determi-
native judgment in the context of establishing
the possibility of determinate knowledge, where
‘its transcendental schematism serves it [. . .] as
a rule under which given empirical intuitions
are subsumed’ (FI 212) so as to provide an
object for the judgment, the reflecting power of
judgment ‘proceeds with given appearances, in
order to bring them under empirical concepts
of determinate natural things [. . .] in accord-
ance with the general but at the same time
indeterminate principle of a purposive arrange-
ment in a system’ (FI 213–214).
The power of judgment in its ‘merely
reflective’ mode proceeds empirically and
ascends from the particular to the general
and unlike judgment in its determining mode,
which subsumes the particular under a uni-
versal, it does not yield a determinate concept
of an object. Therefore, a reflective judgment
is not objectively but merely subjectively nec-
essary. Examples of such judgments are →
aesthetic judgment and teleological judgment
(→ teleology).
In potential conflict with the account
of judgment in CPR is the distinction Kant
Key Themes and Topics
makes in P, published three years before Kant
first defined judgment as an objective unity
of representations in MFNS (476n.), between
judgments of experience and judgments of
perception. The former are ‘empirical judg-
ments, insofar as they have objective validity’,
whereas the latter ‘are only subjectively valid’
and ‘do not require a pure concept of the
understanding, but only the logical connec-
tion of perceptions in a thinking subject’ (P
298). Judgments of perception do not appear
to be consistent with the definition of judg-
ment provided in §19 of CPR.
Most importantly, although the grounding
of both reduces to the same original synthetic
unity of apperception (cf. B133–134n.), Kant
differentiates sharply between analytic and
synthetic judgment (A6ff.=B10ff.). Analytic
judgments are merely clarificatory in that
they are propositions whereby the predicate
is already implicitly contained in the subject
term of the judgment and can be made explicit
by means of conceptual → analysis alone. The
sole principle on which analytic judgments
rest is the → principle of (non-)contradiction.
The reference to any underlying intuition of an
object is otiose as it does not contribute to the
understanding of the relation between subject
and predicate, which is merely conceptual.
A synthetic judgment, by contrast, is a
judgment where the predicate is not already
contained in the subject; synthetic judgments
do not rest on strict conceptual identity
among their predicates. The predicate really
amplifies knowledge that is not already con-
tained in the subject term of a judgment (cf.
JL 111; P 266–268). That which increases
the knowledge beyond the information con-
tained in the predicates must be something
‘in addition to the concept of the subject [.
. .] on which the understanding depends in
cognizing a predicate that does not lie in that
concept as nevertheless belonging to it’ (A8).
218
This something is → experience, from which
analytic judgments are, by contrast, entirely
independent for their comprehension.
All judgments of experience are synthetic.
However, not all synthetic judgments are
empirical judgments of experience, i.e. a pos-
teriori. Crucially, Kant also talks about syn-
thetic a priori judgments (→ synthesis). These
judgments are amplificatory but nonetheless
→ a priori, and do therefore not depend on
experience. Typical synthetic a priori judg-
ments are ‘Everything that happens has its
cause’ (A9=B13) or such mathematical judg-
ments as ‘7+5=12’ (B15) or ‘The straight line
between two points is the shortest’ (B16) (→
mathematics, geometry). The principle that
makes these judgments possible is what is
expressed by the synthetic a priori.
In natural science, synthetic a priori judg-
ments are precisely the principles which
enable objective empirical experiences and
form the subject content of the chapter in
CPR that deals with the ‘synthetic principles
of pure understanding’ (B197ff.=A158ff.)
(→ Axioms of Intuitions, Anticipations of
Perception, Analogies of Experience). – DS
Further Reading
B. Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to
Judge (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1998).
Judgment of taste → aesthetic
judgment
Kingdom of ends
By ‘kingdom’, or better ‘realm [Reich]’,
Kant understands ‘a systematic union of
various rational beings through common

laws’ (G  433). Rational beings, for Kant,
are characterized by two features: (1) they
determine freely their own ends and (2) they
can follow the moral law. This last capacity
grounds their intrinsic dignity. As Kant puts
it: ‘Morality, and humanity insofar as it is
capable of morality, is that which alone has
dignity.’ (G 435)
If we think of this ‘systematic union’ by
abstracting from the particular ends rational
beings may have in virtue of their inclina-
tions, rational beings are thought of merely
as subject to the moral law (the sole ‘com-
mon law’ that remains if such abstraction is
made). We thus arrive at the notion of king-
dom of ends:
[A]ll rational beings stand under the law
that each of them is to treat himself and all
others never merely as means but always
at the same time as ends in themselves.
But from this there arises a systematic
union of rational beings through common
objective laws, that is, a kingdom, which
can be called a kingdom of ends (admit-
tedly only an ideal) [. . .]. (G 433)
In this kingdom, not only do rational beings
treat each other as ends in themselves, but
they are also the authors of the laws to which
they are subject. If a member is ‘not subject
to the will of any other’ (G 433) and if ‘he is a
completely independent being, without needs
and with unlimited resources adequate to
his will’ (G 434), then this member belongs
to the kingdom as a sovereign (Oberhaupt).
Therefore, rational yet finite beings such as
ourselves belong to the kingdom as members
and as legislators. An infinite rational being
such as God belongs to it as sovereign.
Although ‘only an ideal’ (G 433), the
notion of kingdom of ends plays a crucial role
in Kant’s ethical system. In fact, it is intrinsi-
cally connected to the very idea of → morality.
219
Key Themes and Topics
‘Morality’, Kant says, ‘consists [. . .] in the refer-
ence of all action to the lawgiving by which
alone a kingdom of ends is possible’ (G 434).
Acting morally, in other words, means acting
as if we were members (legislators and at the
same time subjects) of a kingdom of ends. A
rational, autonomous being cannot but see
himself as member of a kingdom of ends.
To deny such membership would be tan-
tamount to denying one’s transcendental
→ freedom, that is, one’s ability to legislate
from the universal point of view required by
the moral law, which in turn would be tanta-
mount to denying one’s own personality.
The close relationship between the idea
of the kingdom of ends and that of moral-
ity is also made evident by the fact that one
of the formulas of the → categorical impera-
tive turns on this notion, namely that ‘every
rational being must act as if he were by his
maxims at all times a lawgiving member
of the universal kingdom of ends’ (G 438).
Stated as an imperative this becomes: ‘[A]ct
in accordance with the maxims of a member
giving universal laws for a merely possible
kingdom of ends.’ (G 439)
This formula brings to light one of the crucial
dimensions of moral agency, namely the neces-
sity in our moral reasoning to rise to the level of
an ideal legislator of an equally ideal kingdom
to enact laws which could earn acceptance by
a community of fully rational agents.
Interestingly, in CPrR, Kant clarifies that
we should not think of ourselves as sover-
eigns in the kingdom of ends, at least if this
implies failing to recognize our inferior posi-
tion as creatures in this kingdom, that is,
as beings that necessarily stand under the
authority of the law. As Kant puts it:
We are indeed lawgiving members of a
kingdom of morals possible through free-
dom [. . .] but we are at the same time
Key Themes and Topics
subjects in it, not its sovereign, and to
fail to recognize our inferior position as
creatures and to deny from self-conceit
the authority of the holy law is already to
defect from it in spirit, even though the let-
ter of the law is fulfilled. (CprR 82–83)
We are authorized to think of ourselves as
legislators of the kingdom, because the moral
law springs from our own reason, but not
as sovereigns. The law in fact presents itself
with absolute authority and exacts subor-
dination. It is an absolute command (albeit
self-imposed), quite different from the dis-
cretionary power usually associated with the
idea of sovereignty. – LC
Further Reading
K. Flikschuh, ‘Kant’s kingdom of ends:
metaphysical, not political’, in J.
Timmermann (ed.), Kant’s Groundwork
of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical
Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), pp. 119–139.
C. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of
Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), pt. I.
J. Timmermann, Kant’s Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals. A Commentary
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007).
Knowledge (cognition)
In the so-called Stufenleiter, an ‘objective
perception’, that is, a perception that refers
to an → object, is defined as knowledge
(Erkenntnis) or cognition, which ‘is either
an intuition or a concept (intuitus vel con-
ceptus)’ (B376=A320), corresponding to
220
sensibility and the understanding respec-
tively, or what Kant intriguingly refers to as
the ‘two stems of human cognition, which
may perhaps arise from a common but to us
unknown root’ (B29).
However, Kant states that knowledge
in the strict sense can only arise from the
combination of → intuition and concept, as
‘[t]houghts without content are empty,
[and] intuitions without concepts [. . .]
blind’ (A51=B75). More in particular,
knowledge or cognition, according to
Kant in a late essay, ‘is a judgment from
which proceeds a concept that has objec-
tive reality, i.e., to which a corresponding
object can be given in experience’ (PE 266).
Furthermore, knowledge is → transcenden-
tal when it concerns not objects but the
faculty of knowledge itself in respect of its
a priori application to things (A11–12, cf.
P 293).
The various forms of knowledge that
Kant recognizes depend on the various
forms of → judgment. One can distinguish
four basic types of knowledge. Knowledge,
like judgment, can be analytic, synthetic, a
posteriori or → a priori. Analytic knowledge
is purely formal (cf. JL 111), ‘from mere
concepts’ (A47=B64; cf. A7–8). ‘With ana-
lytic cognition I make a given concept dis-
tinct’ (LL 845). It rests essentially on the →
principle of (non-)contradiction. Knowledge
is synthetic when the predicate of the judg-
ment is not a part of the subject. A posteriori
knowledge consists in empirical judgments
drawn from → experience, whereas a pri-
ori knowledge is independent of all percep-
tion and all experience. These four types of
knowledge were already identified by Kant
in a reflection dating from around 1770: ‘All
knowledge is based in either empirical or
rational principles; the latter are either logi-
cal or real.’ (Refl 4162)

Kant’s question concerning the possibility
of knowledge in general reduces to the cen-
tral question of his theoretical philosophy:
‘How are synthetic judgments a priori possi-
ble?’ (B19) The question can be rephrased as
follows: Can one speak of a priori synthetic
(non-analytic) judgments which are both
necessary and universally valid? How is it
possible for there to be any sort of necessity
of or within experience?
‘To know is to judge something and hold
it to be true with certainty’ (LL 148). All
knowledge consists in the recognition of a
→ necessity. Such necessity is at once formal
and material. Apodictic judgments express a
lawfulness that does not in any way abstract
from the given material of the actual (→
laws (of nature)/lawfulness). Necessity in
this sense consists in the framing of the real
in accordance with a rule; it is the relation
of an object to thinking insofar as thinking
determines the being of the object itself. An
apodictic judgment is one that, like the con-
clusion of a syllogism, can never be contin-
gent, but rather contains necessity in itself:
‘[T]he conclusion is always accompanied
with the consciousness of necessity and con-
sequently has the dignity of an apodeictic
proposition.’ (JL 122)
The formal unity of consciousness, or the
transcendental unity of apperception (→
apperception), is the highest presupposition
of all necessary synthetic connections of
the sensibly given manifold and, as a result,
the necessary ground of the objectivity of
knowledge (cf. B137) (→ object, objectiv-
ity). Things in themselves, on the other hand,
which abstract from all connection with
experience, cannot be known (→ transcen-
dental idealism; thing in itself).
The two most basic forms of rational
knowledge are expounded at the beginning
of the Transcendental Doctrine of Method in
221
Key Themes and Topics
the section of the CPR called the Discipline
of Pure Reason. Specifically, the two forms
of rational knowledge are philosophical
knowledge ‘from concepts’, which consid-
ers the particular only in the universal, and
mathematical knowledge ‘from the construc-
tion of concepts’, which, by contrast, con-
siders ‘the universal in the particular, indeed
even in the individual, yet nonetheless a pri-
ori and by means of reason’ (A714=B742).
Philosophical knowledge is divided into pure
and empirical cognition (A840=B868). It is
sub-divided further into propaedeutic and
→ metaphysics, the latter comprising the
metaphysics of nature and the metaphysics
of morals (cf. A841=B869).
In contrast to the rationalists, who derive
all knowledge from a single principle (the
principle of non-contradiction), and the
empiricists (→ empiricism), who gladly
renounce the programme of systematizing
knowledge, Kant wrestled with the question
of architectonic and the systematic unity of
knowledge intensively for his entire life (→
system). Questions concerning the taxonomy
of knowledge are prominent in Kant’s think-
ing from DSS onwards. – GM/SS
Laws (of nature), lawfulness
In Kant’s theoretical philosophy, the faculty of
understanding is identified as the ‘source of the
laws of nature’ (A127). Through the under-
standing and its categories the manifold of
appearances, coming from the pure forms of
sensible → intuition, is conceptually determined.
Appearances (→ appearance) become objects of
→ experience, ultimately, by virtue of the unity
of apperception as the transcendental ground for
the lawfulness of nature (→ deduction, appercep-
tion). Hence, all empirical laws can be regarded
Key Themes and Topics
as ‘particular determinations of the pure laws of
the understanding’ (A128). Although empiri-
cal laws do not completely derive from the
understanding, the ‘necessary lawfulness of all
appearances in an experience’ (A127) derives
nonetheless from the understanding.
The question then arises as to how nature
with its empirical laws can possibly conform
to the understanding, without deriving com-
pletely from it. The solution lies in Kant’s
system of the principles of pure understand-
ing. They provide rules for the objective use
of the categories, namely rules that explicate
how a given category applies to particular
appearances and transform them into objects
of experience.
Patterned upon the table of categories,
Kant’s table of principles of the understand-
ing includes: (1) → Axioms of Intuition (cor-
responding to the category of quantity); (2) →
Anticipations of Perception (corresponding to
the category of quality); (3) → Analogies of
Experience (corresponding to the category of
relation); and (4) → Postulates of Empirical
Thinking in General (corresponding to the
category of modality) (→ experience).
The Analogies of Experience are of par-
ticular relevance to the issue of the laws of
nature. They are principles that allow the rep-
resentation of the manifold of appearances
‘as it is objectively in time’ (B219). That is to
say, they concern the existence and the rela-
tion of appearances to one another according
to the three temporal modes of persistence,
succession, and simultaneity. Accordingly,
the first Analogy is the principle of the per-
sistence of substance (A182). The second is
the principle of temporal sequence according
to the law of causality (B233). The third is
the principle of simultaneity according to the
law of interaction or community (B257).
Patterned upon the three Analogies of
Experience, Kant offered three laws of
222
mechanics as metaphysical principles of pure
→ natural science, in the third chapter of
MFNS. Kant’s first mechanical law follows
the first Analogy of Experience (persistence
of substance) in claiming that the ‘the total
quantity of matter remains the same, nei-
ther increased nor diminished’ (MFNS 541).
Based on the Second Analogy (causality),
Kant’s second mechanical law reads: ‘Every
change in matter has an external cause.
(Every body persists in its state of rest or
motion, in the same direction, and with the
same speed, if it is not compelled by an exter-
nal cause to leave this state).’ (MFNS 543)
And based on the third Analogy (interaction,
or community) the third mechanical law is
formulated thus: ‘In all communication of
motion, action and reaction are always equal
to one another.’ (MFNS 544)
Kant scholars have long debated the
extent to which Kant’s three mechanical
laws are equivalent to → Newton’s three
laws of motion, given the notable absence of
Newton’s second law in Kant’s mechanics. A
related, and more general debate concerns the
extent to which the Second Analogy is meant
to capture the temporal succession of events
as causally determined either in a loose sense
or in accordance with universal and neces-
sary causal laws; and whether the law-gov-
ernedness of nature is ultimately due to the
faculty of understanding with its constitutive
principles, or to the faculty of reflective judg-
ment with its → regulative principles.
Indeed, in FI Kant reassigned the lawfulness
of nature to the faculty of reflective judgment
as the faculty that searches for empirically
determined concepts under which given
particulars can be subsumed. The faculty of
understanding can only provide objects of
experience and particular empirical laws. But
given the ‘infinite multiplicity of empirical
laws and such a great heterogeneity of forms

of nature’, a principle of the faculty of reflec-
tive judgment is required to warrant the ‘thor-
oughly lawlike interconnection, i.e., empirical
unity of these experiences’ (FI 203).
Kant called it the principle of the purpo-
siveness of nature, as a regulative principle
without which ‘the systematic unity in the
thoroughgoing classification of particular
forms in accordance with empirical laws
would not be possible’ (FI 219) (→ teleol-
ogy). It is not a constitutive principle, since it
does not provide the necessary condition of
possibility of any experience. But it comple-
ments the faculty of understanding in mak-
ing possible our knowledge of nature as a
lawful system. – MM
Further Reading
H. Allison, ‘Causality and causal laws in
Kant: a critique of Michael Friedman’, in
Idealism and Freedom. Essays on Kant’s
Theoretical and Practical Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), pp. 80–91.
G. Buchdahl, ‘The conception of lawlikeness
in Kant’s philosophy of science’, in L. W.
Beck (ed.) Kant’s Theory of Knowledge
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1974), pp. 128–150.
M. Friedman, ‘Causal laws and the
foundations of natural science’, in
P. Guyer (ed.) The Cambridge Companion
to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), pp. 161–199.
Logic (concept, thought,
syllogism)
Logic is for Kant the science of ‘the formal
rules of all thinking’ (Bix), and is grounded
in the faculties of understanding and →
223
Key Themes and Topics
reason. The understanding is characterized
as the faculty of concepts (A160=B199), of
thought (A50–51=B74–75), and of rules
(A132=B171), whereas reason, the capacity
for principles (A299ff.=B356ff.), is in its log-
ical use the faculty of making inferences from
rules. Kant’s conception of logic is broadly
Aristotelian (including some propositional
logic). Kant famously claims that logic has
been ‘unable to take a single step forward’
since the time of → Aristotle (Bviii), though it
can ‘gain in regard to exactness, determinate-
ness and distinctness’ (JL 20). Kant follows
the traditional tripartite division of logic
as concerned with concept, → judgment,
and inference. These are linked to the three
aspects of the higher cognitive faculty: the
understanding, the power of judgment, and
reason, respectively (A130=B169).
Kant divides logic into general logic and
particular logic. The former abstracts from
all objects, whereas the latter consists of
rules for ‘a certain kind of objects’ (of a spe-
cial science) (A52=B76). General and for-
mal logic, which disregards the content of
cognition, is pure (i.e. strictly → a priori).
Pure logic has therefore nothing to do with
psychology, which is considered in ‘applied’
logic (A53=B77).
A further distinction is that between gen-
eral (but merely formal) and → transcen-
dental logic. The latter takes account of the
conditions for cognizing objects a priori. As
general logic gives the clue for finding the
categories, it plays a most important role
in Kant’s philosophy (→ deduction), even if
general logic as purely formal is of limited
cognitive importance. As concerned solely
with → form, it is not sufficient for cognizing
the → truth of a synthetic judgment, which
depends on its → object. Mistaking general
logic for an organon, which is a sufficient
condition for the acquisition of contentful
Key Themes and Topics
cognition, constitutes dialectic, the logic of
illusion (A61=B85) (→ Dialectic).
Kant’s theory of concepts starts from the
critical division of the cognitive faculties. A
concept is a general → representation medi-
ately linked to objects, whereas an → intui-
tion is a singular representation immediately
connected to its object (A19=B33; JL 91).
This goes against the rationalist doctrine
of singular concepts; for Kant, a concept is
essentially general. It contains marks that are
common to several objects (LL 752).
Concepts are generated by certain acts of
the understanding: comparison, reflection
and abstraction. In comparing for instance a
spruce, a willow and a linden, their differ-
ences are attended to. Reflection involves
noticing what they have in common, and
abstraction, finally, is the isolating of these
common marks (e.g. the possession of a
trunk, branches and leaves), leaving out
the differences, so that the concept ‘tree’ is
acquired (JL 94–95). This account, which
is close to that of the Wolffians (→ Wolff),
may appear artificial: noticing differences
(comparison) seems to involve noticing what
the objects have in common (reflection). But
rather than meaning three successive stages,
Kant perhaps points to conditions for acquir-
ing and having a concept: this requires the
ability to notice both similarities and differ-
ences, and to abstract from the differences.
Kant’s theory of concepts develops the
Cartesian and Leibnizian-Wolffian distinc-
tions concerning clarity and distinctness. A
concept is clear if a person is conscious of
it (JL 33; LL 702). Clear concepts can be
distinct or indistinct. A concept is distinct if
the person is clear about its content, i.e. the
marks of which it is composed (cf. JL 34).
To make a concept distinct is to analyze it
into its constituents. Distinctness comes in
degrees. A complete → analysis would result
224
in a definition; but for given concepts we
cannot be certain of having achieved that
(A728=B756). An incomplete analysis of a
concept is called an exposition (A729=B757).
Kant also countenances obscure, as opposed
to clear, concepts (i.e. unconscious ones)
(LL 702).
Relative to their intension (Kant uses the
term ‘content’), concepts can be hierarchi-
cally ordered. The higher concepts are poorer
and the lower ones richer in intension. So for
instance, ‘metal’ is above ‘gold’. Since the lat-
ter concept is a specification of the former,
and ‘gold’ contains all the marks of ‘metal’
plus additional ones, its intension is richer.
The extension of ‘gold’ – the concepts below
it in the hierarchy, or as Kant often says,
‘contained under’ it  – is on the other hand
less than the extension of the higher concept
‘metal’. Intension and extension are thus
inversely proportional (JL 95; LL 925).
Kant is sometimes unclear as to whether
the extension is the concepts located under a
concept in the hierarchy, or rather the objects
falling under it (the modern sense of ‘exten-
sion’). The hierarchical ordering of concepts
can also be expressed in the terminology of
genus and species (JL 96–97). A higher con-
cept is a genus for that which is under it (its
species), but is itself a species under a higher
concept, its genus (LL 911).
Similar views are frequently met in Kant’s
contemporaries (→ Meier); they go back to
Aristotle’s doctrine of genus and species
and the conceptual trees of Porphyry. Kant
deviates from one strand of this tradition
by stressing that there can be no individual
concepts at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Concepts can always be further specified
(LL 927). The hierarchical model of con-
cepts is the background to the distinction
of analytic and synthetic judgments. In
an analytic → judgment, the predicate’s

marks are contained in the subject, and
conceptual containment is modelled in such
hierarchies.
Concepts are combined into judgments (in
accordance with the elementary forms sys-
tematized in the Table of Judgment). To make
logical inferences from judgments is the task
of reason. In its logical use, it is the capacity to
infer (or draw a conclusion) from a premise,
insofar as the inference is mediate, that is,
requires another premise. Inferences of reason
(syllogisms) consist of a major and a minor
premise from which the conclusion is drawn
(A304=B361; A330=B386). In contrast, a
direct or immediate inference (for instance of
‘Some B are A’ from ‘All A are B’) is an infer-
ence of the understanding (Verstandesschluss)
(A303=B360). Here, conclusion and ground
share the same matter but differ in form
(LL 769), whereas in a syllogism the conclu-
sion differs from the ground as to matter, i.e.
the pair of concepts in the conclusion is not
found together in any of the premises.
There are three forms of syllogism: the
categorical, the hypothetical and the dis-
junctive (A304=B361). Each of these has as
major premise a judgment of one of the three
relational forms in Kant’s Table of Judgment.
Examples of the types of syllogism are ‘All
A are B, All C are A, therefore all C are B’
(categorical); ‘If A then B, A, therefore B’
(hypothetical); and ‘A is either B or C, A is
not B, therefore A is C’ (disjunctive). The
hypothetical and the disjunctive inferences
do not belong to Aristotelian syllogistic, but
conform to Kant’s wider characterization of
the syllogism as a mediate inference from a
premise serving as a rule (A304=B360–361).
Kant calls the major premise in a cat-
egorical syllogism (e.g. ‘All philosophers are
learned’) the rule, whereas the minor premise
(e.g. ‘Locke is a philosopher’) puts the cog-
nition it expresses ‘under the condition of
225
Key Themes and Topics
the rule’ (A304=B360). This means that its
subject term, ‘Locke’, is subsumed under
the predicate ‘philosopher’, which is the
‘condition’ (i.e. subject term) of the major
premise (the rule). Reason is thus able to
determine ‘Locke’ through the predicate of
the rule, and infer that Locke is learned (cf.
A304=B360–361).
The major premise of a syllogism is itself
conditioned, and presupposes further con-
ditions from which it follows. Obviously,
this would be the case also for such further
conditions. Only if the totality of conditions
could be given would reason’s demand for
the unconditioned be satisfied (A307=B364).
This ascending series from condition to fur-
ther conditions consists of prosyllogisms, in
which the major premise of a given syllogism
is inferred as conclusion from higher premises
(A331=B387–388). The descending series
from the conditioned to further inferences,
through episyllogisms, where the conclusion
of a syllogism is used as premise for a new
syllogism, can also be continued indefinitely,
but it is not important for reason. For rea-
son seeks grounds; and a given judgment is
grounded on its premises and not on its poten-
tial consequences (A331ff.=B388ff.). – MQ
Further Reading
B. Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to
Judge (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1998), pt. II.
R. Stuhlmann-Laeisz, Kants Logik (Berlin/
New York: de Gruyter, 1976).
Majority, maturity →
Enlightenment
Manifold → synthesis
Key Themes and Topics
Mark, characteristic (Merkmal)
→ logic
Mathematics
Mathematical knowledge interests Kant for
two reasons. First, it forms a paradigmatic
case of synthetic a priori knowledge (B14–17)
(→ synthesis), and as such is a problematic
type of → knowledge (A10), whose validity
CPR sets out to ground (B20). Second, math-
ematical knowledge stands both as a model
for, and in contrast to, philosophical knowl-
edge (→ method).
On the one hand, the success of mathe-
matics (and → natural science) is presented
by Kant (Bx–Bxv) as standing in contrast
to the disarray characterizing metaphysical
speculation (Bxiv), and thus functions as
a model for future metaphysics (Bxvi). On
the other hand, mathematical knowledge
is differentiated from philosophical knowl-
edge insofar as the latter is ‘rational cogni-
tion from concepts’, whereas ‘mathematical
cognition [is] that from the construction of
concepts’ (A713=B741).
Kant starts addressing the quid juris ques-
tion regarding mathematical knowledge in
the → Transcendental Aesthetic (B41). →
Geometry, the science of space, represents
Kant’s favourite example of mathematical
knowledge, largely because geometric con-
structions are ostensive.
But arithmetic occupies a very central
place in Kant’s account of cognition insofar
as ‘number is nothing other than the unity of
the synthesis of the manifold of a homogene-
ous intuition in general’ (A143=B182). Thus
number, as the schema of magnitude, provides
a rule for the generation of time, and is thus
involved in the → synthesis of apprehension
of any object.
226
Kant gives us an account of why arithmet-
ical truths are synthetic a priori. Famously,
Kant explains how, when adding 7 and 5,
one makes use of an intuitive representation
(e.g. fingers or points) of 7 to which one con-
secutively adds 5 times one unit to obtain 12
(B15–16). This construction in → intuition is
meant to show that the concept of ‘12’ can-
not be found by mere → analysis of the con-
cepts of ‘7’ and ‘5’, hence that the judgment
‘7+5=12’ is synthetic (B16).
To understand the meaning of the synthetic
nature of arithmetic, it is instructive to see
the failure of attempts such as → Leibniz’s to
show that such propositions of arithmetic are
analytic: Leibniz’s proof relies upon the cov-
ert use of non-analytic principles (associativ-
ity and commutativity of addition). The view
that Kant has an axiomatic conception of
arithmetic would be incompatible with some
of Kant’s statements (A163–164=B204), and
in any case, insufficient to account for the
role of intuition.
A key problem though is the question how
the timeless truths of arithmetic can depend
upon a construction in time. The answer
lies in recalling that number is defined by
Kant as ‘[t]he pure schema of magnitude’
(A142=B182). That is, number ‘n’ is a rule
for the construction of intuitions of collec-
tions of n objects. When summing 7 and 5,
the combined use of the rules for 7 points
and 5 points leads to the construction in
intuition of a number of points that, accord-
ing to the rule for construction of 12, can be
identified as that number.
The spelling out of the word ‘synthetic’ to
find out how many letters it contains is an
analogous synthetic construction. It is only
by applying the rules for spelling that word
and counting up to 9 that one comes by the
synthetic truth that the number of letters in

that word is 9. This is how mathematical
cognition arrives at the universal (concep-
tual) through the particular (intuition).
Unlike the ostensive constructions of
geometry, algebraic symbols no longer refer
to objects, so algebraic construction in intui-
tion is symbolic (A717=B745). This may
seem like a weaker sense of construction
in intuition, particularly in view of the cen-
trality of the geometric paradigm in Kant’s
writings. But there is a sense in which alge-
braic constructions are paradigmatic for
mathematical construction in intuition, as it
is quantity itself (quantitas), rather than the
magnitude of some object (as quantum), that
is at stake. If algebra and geometry repre-
sent two poles of the notion of mathemati-
cal construction, arithmetic lies in between.
Arithmetical constructions are ostensive, but
I construct numbers of objects, not numbers
themselves, which are schemata, i.e. repre-
sentations of construction rules. Insofar as
the construction operates on numerals that
refer to rules, it is also symbolic. Whether
ostensive, symbolic, or both, all mathemati-
cal constructions are in spatial intuition for
Kant. – CO
Further Reading
G. Brittan, ‘Kant’s philosophy of
mathematics’, in G. Bird (ed.), A
Companion to Kant (Malden, MA/
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010),
pp. 222–235.
R. Butts, ‘Rules, examples and constructions.
Kant’s theory of mathematics’, Synthese
47,2 (1981): 257–288.
C. Parsons, ‘Kant’s philosophy of
arithmetic’, in C. Posy (ed.), Kant’s
Philosophy of Mathematics – Modern
Essays (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992),
pp. 43–79.
227
Key Themes and Topics
L. Shabel, ‘Kant’s philosophy of
mathematics’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Kant and
Modern Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006),
pp. 94–128.
J. M. Young, ‘Kant on the construction of
arithmetical concepts’, Kant-Studien 73
(1982): 17–46.
Maxim → categorical imperative
Metaphysical deduction →
deduction
Metaphysics
‘This much is certain: whosoever has once
tasted of critique forever loathes all the dog-
matic chatter with which he previously had to
put up with out of necessity, since his reason
was in need of something and could not find
anything better for its sustenance.’ (P 366)
Kant here identifies his entire work as the
turning point in the resolution and rebirth of
metaphysics. It is through transcendental phi-
losophy that the progress of metaphysics from
a natural disposition of → reason (P 279; cf.
B21, Bxxxi) – which falsely assumes a second
world of substances behind the visible appear-
ances – to metaphysics as science first becomes
possible. The fundamental question of CPR is
this: How are synthetic a priori judgments (→
judgment, synthesis) possible? The success or
failure of metaphysics depends on the solution
of this central problem (B19).
In CPR  – which, according to a letter to
Marcus → Herz from 11 May 1781, contains
the ‘metaphysics of metaphysics’ (Corr-I
269)  – Kant shows that traditional meta-
physics as the science of the first, general
Key Themes and Topics
principles of things (ontology), as well as
the speculative investigation of the soul (→
psychology) (→ Paralogisms), the world
(cosmology) (→ Antinomies) and God (the-
ology) (→ proofs of the existence of God), is
no longer possible. Ontology can no longer
be a science of things in themselves (→ tran-
scendental idealism), but rather – as Critical
ontology  – it is the science of the a priori
conditions under which alone the objects of
experience can be known (→ object/objectiv-
ity, experience, deduction).
The metaphysical pretensions of specula-
tive reason to have knowledge of the soul,
the world and God are finally put to rest
in the Transcendental → Dialectic of CPR.
The old metaphysical dispute concerning the
soul, the world and God – the three branches
of metaphysica specialis, in contrast to ontol-
ogy as metaphysica generalis, according to
the Wolffian division (→ Wolff) – is neverthe-
less carried further by Kant through consid-
eration of the theoretical presuppositions of
morals within the so called Postulates of Pure
Practical Reason in CPrR (→ morality).
Kant held lectures on metaphysics for 40
years (from the Winter semester of 1755/56 to
the Winter semester of 1795/96) at the Albertus
University in → Königsberg. In August 1770
he was named Professor Ordinarius of Logic
and Metaphysics. Kant’s chosen text was →
Baumgarten’s Metaphysica. This gave him the
opportunity to present his criticisms and his
new conception of metaphysics before the stu-
dents, though his views were presented most
clearly in his own writings.
In ND, Kant denies the existence of a high-
est principle (pace Wolff and Baumgarten),
and rejects as mistaken the assumed equiva-
lence of ratio actualitatis and ratio veritatis.
The philosophical foundations of the subjec-
tivism and empiricism of Christian August →
Crusius, who had proposed an anti-Wolffian
228
metaphysics, are criticized here as well.
Problems of natural philosophy (the theory
of fire, of heaven, of monads, of wind, etc.)
(→ natural science) are dealt with by the
young Kant always with a view to the radical
reform of metaphysics.
In the first lectures that have been handed
down to us (the Metaphysik Herder of
1762–1764 [LM]), Kant directs a number
of criticisms against metaphysics as it was
then practiced. It is ‘hard’, he complains. It
is poorly presented  – a ‘plague of souls’. It
is also ‘dry’ because very abstract. But most
significantly, it is uncertain: The irresolvable
dispute between → Leibniz and Clarke is for
Kant the clearest demonstration of the unde-
cidability of metaphysical questions (LM
157). The following comment from the Prize
Essay of 1764 (→ Academy prize essay) is
apposite: ‘Metaphysics is without doubt the
most difficult of all the things into which
man has insight. But so far no metaphysics
has ever been written.’ (Inq 283)
Metaphysicians have always tried to
import the method of → mathematics into
philosophy – an impossible move, according
to Kant, for at least two reasons: (1) While
in mathematics a small number of definitions
serve as the primary indemonstrable con-
cepts, in metaphysics various indemonstrable
propositions must furnish the primary data.
(2) Mathematics is easier than metaphysics
and partakes of a greater degree of intuition
(cf. Inq 296). Its immediate relation to intui-
tion is in fact the feature of mathematics that
distinguishes it most clearly from philosophy.
In the Second Reflection of Inq (283ff.),
Kant tries to validate the method of meta-
physics by modelling it on the method of
Newtonian physics (→ Newton) rather than
mathematics – though this tendency is argu-
ably present in all of his writings from 1755
onwards.

In the lectures on metaphysics of the
winter semester 1765/66, Kant placed his
commentary on the empirical psychology
of Baumgarten before the commentary on
ontology and the other parts of metaphysics.
This is a clear indication of the tendency to
psychologize and anthropologize philosophy,
which occurred both in his thoughts as well
as explicitly in his writings of the period.
This subjectifying tendency is, however,
always accompanied by deep reflection on the
possibility of transforming the foundations of
metaphysics. One can even say that the deci-
sive thoughts which led Kant to re-conceive
the whole of metaphysics are implicit in his
original conception of mathematics. His criti-
cisms of dogmatism and → empiricism in fact
pertain in the first instance to the ‘logicistic’
understanding of → geometry and arithme-
tic. The task of revising metaphysics requires
bringing mathematics within the sphere of
experience, something that Kant accomplished
both in DS (1768) as well as ID (1770).
Kant’s most pointed criticism of tradi-
tional metaphysics occurs not in CPR but in
DSS, a work which contains an ironic and
sometimes amusing comparison between
metaphysics and the art of spirit-seeing (→
enthusiasm, Swedenborg). At the beginning
of the third chapter (in the so-called ‘Anti-
Cabbala’), an account of the immaterial
world is dismissed outright as a vision of
reason. But metaphysics is also defined here
positively as the science of the boundaries of
the faculty of knowledge (cf. DSS 351, 368).
In DSS, Kant  – inspired by Newton and →
Rousseau – sketches the basic idea for his later
division of metaphysics into the metaphysics
of nature and the metaphysics of morals, a
classification which brings ethics for the first
time into the system of metaphysics.
There are two possible causes of anything
that happens in the world. An event can be
229
Key Themes and Topics
the result of physical determination or of free
action (→ freedom). Kant develops the entire
system of a new metaphysics on the basis of
the fundamental antinomy between nature
and freedom (→ Antinomies): ‘Metaphysics
is divided into the metaphysics of the specula-
tive and the practical use of pure reason, and
is therefore either metaphysics of nature or
metaphysics of morals. The former contains
all rational principles from mere concepts
(hence with the exclusion of mathematics)
for the theoretical cognition of all things; the
latter, the principles which determine action
and omission a priori and make them neces-
sary.’ (A841=B869)
Preserving the Hellenistic division of phi-
losophy into three sciences  – logic, physics
and ethics – Kant distinguishes at the begin-
ning of G between formal philosophy, or logic,
which is ‘occupied only with the form of the
understanding and of reason itself and with
the universal rules of thinking in general’, and
material philosophy, or metaphysics, ‘which
has to do with determinate objects and the
laws to which they are subject’ (G 387). Since
these are either → laws of nature or laws of
freedom, metaphysics is further subdivided
into a theoretical part  – the metaphysics of
nature, or physics – and a practical part – the
metaphysics of morals, or ethics.
In the notes for the Academy prize ques-
tion of 1795 on the progress of metaphys-
ics in Germany since the time of Leibniz and
Wolff (which were printed posthumously in
1804), Kant identifies dogmatism, scepticism
and empiricism as the ‘three stages which
philosophy had to traverse in its approach
to metaphysics’ (PE 264). There are, accord-
ing to Kant, two hinges on which the new
metaphysics turns: ‘First, the doctrine of the
ideality of space and time, which in regard to
theoretical principles merely points toward
the super-sensible, but for us unknowable
Key Themes and Topics
[. . .]; second, the doctrine of the reality of the
concept of freedom, as that of a knowable
super-sensible, in which metaphysics is still
only practico-dogmatic.’ (PE 311) – GM/SS
Further Reading
K. Ameriks, ‘The critique of metaphysics:
Kant and traditional ontology’, in P.
Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion
to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), pp. 249–279.
N. Fischer (ed.), Kants Grundlegung einer
kritischen Metaphysik (Hamburg: Meiner,
2010).
J. Van Cleve, Problems from Kant (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chs
10–13.
Method
In P, Kant makes a distinction between the
‘critical method’ and ‘the dogmatic method’
(P 308), where the Critical method provides
a means to investigate the a priori principles
of experience ‘completely and according to a
principle’ ‘from the nature of the understand-
ing itself’, rather than dogmatically ‘from the
things themselves’ (P 308). At the same time,
the Critical method assures that ‘only as
objects of experience are all things necessarily
subject a priori’ to the principles of experience,
not as things in themselves, which is the central
purport of Kant’s → transcendental idealism.
This intimate connection between the possibil-
ity of → a priori cognition and the limitation
of → knowledge to the objects of possible →
experience is the differentiating characteristic
of Kant’s Critical method (→ Critique).
In the preface to the second edition,
Kant expounds on the significance of the
230
properly methodical nature of CPR, which
he calls a ‘treatise on the method’ (Bxxii) of
→ metaphysics as science. He repeats here
again the nature of the Critical method as
having to do with a reversal in the way a
priori cognition, the business of metaphys-
ics, can be made possible as opposed to
the many attempts in traditional, dogmatic
metaphysics to extend knowledge syntheti-
cally. Kant does this by enacting a thought
experiment, which he presents as analo-
gous to the way Copernicus made advances
in astronomy possible (Bxvi; cf. Bxviii n.).
The thought experiment relates to the way,
similar to the account in P, in which it is
suggested that only an antecedent analysis
of the subjective conditions of thought will
provide apodictic insight into the a priori
relation between subject and → object.
The acceptance of this hypothesis results in
what Kant calls ‘the altered method of our
way of thinking’ (Bxviii).
Despite the ostensibly hypothetical nature
of the thought experiment in the B-Preface,
Kant however insists that ‘[c]riticism is not
opposed to the dogmatic procedure of reason
in its pure cognition as science’. For Kant,
science, and thus metaphysics, ‘must always
be dogmatic, i.e., it must prove its conclu-
sions strictly a priori from secure principles’
(Bxxxv). The sense in which it is opposed
to dogmatic metaphysics is that rather than
presuming to be able to obtain (synthetic)
knowledge purely on the basis of concep-
tual → analysis, reason must first critically
inquire ‘in what way and by what right it has
obtained’ the principles by means of which it
acquires pure cognition (Bxxxv).
This procedure also explains the crucial
distinction that Kant makes in P (P 263,
274ff., 278ff.) between the analytic and syn-
thetic methods, or regressive and progressive
methods respectively. Analysis ‘proceeds from

that which is sought as if it were given, and
ascends to the conditions under which alone
it is possible’ (P 276n.), i.e. from consequent
to ground, whereas conversely → synthesis
proceeds from ground to consequent. Kant
makes clear that while P is sketched out after
the analytical method, CPR itself must be
synthetic, that is, start from a principle rather
than from a given in experience, which in the
case of P is the fact of → natural science and
→ mathematics, the grounds of whose pos-
sibility is inquired into by regressive analy-
sis. Only the synthetic, progressive method,
however, constitutes a genuine philosophical
→ proof, which accepts no data ‘except rea-
son itself’ and thus ‘develop[s] cognition out
of its original seeds without relying on any
fact whatever’ (P 274).
This is somewhat similar to the remark
Kant makes in the B-Preface, namely that
what in the Preface had been proposed ‘as
a hypothesis’ (i.e. the Copernican thought
experiment), must ‘in the treatise itself [. . .]
be proved not hypothetically but rather apo-
dictically from the constitution of our rep-
resentations of space and time and from the
elementary concepts of the understanding’
(Bxxii n.). Proofs in philosophy must always
be ‘ostensive’ (A789=B817), albeit not in
the mathematical sense, as Kant makes suf-
ficiently clear in the Transcendental Doctrine
of Method, the second main part of CPR,
which however only takes up one-sixth of
the whole of CPR.
In the first chapter of this part, on the
Discipline of Pure Reason, Kant explicates
the distinctive method of the transcen-
dental philosophy. He defines discipline
as having the task of limiting and eventu-
ally eradicating the ‘compulsion through
which the constant propensity to stray
from certain rules is limited’ (A709=B737).
Although it makes a negative contribution,
231
Key Themes and Topics
the faculty of reason ‘badly needs a disci-
pline to constrain its propensity to expan-
sion beyond the narrow boundaries of
possible experience’ (A711=B739). Unlike
the Transcendental Dialectic which focused
upon the content of the claims made by
reason in its use beyond these boundaries,
the discipline looks at the method that rea-
son employs.
In a first section on the dogmatic use
of reason, Kant compares the warranted
employment of reason in mathematics with
‘that by means of which one seeks the same
certainty in philosophy’ (A713=B741). He
rejects the notion that the difference between
philosophy and mathematics could lie in the
first dealing with quality while the latter has
quantity as its object (A714=B742). While it
is true that mathematics constructs magni-
tudes (or even magnitude in algebra), it does
not deal with quality simply because the lat-
ter requires empirical intuition (A715=B743),
which is also lacking for pure concepts of
reason.
Rather, mathematics exhibits its concepts
in pure intuition, by construction, i.e. through
a homogeneous synthesis which considers its
objects merely as quanta (A723=B751) (→
Transcendental Aesthetic). The success of
the mathematical method leads to the expec-
tations that it could be successful in pure
philosophy (A724ff.=B752ff.). Philosophy
cannot exhibit its concepts in pure intuition
(A722=B750), and appeal to empirical intui-
tion cannot yield a priori knowledge. But
this leaves a task for philosophy, namely to
explore the principles ‘of the synthesis of pos-
sible empirical intuitions’ (A722=B750): this
defines ‘rational cognition from concepts,
which is called philosophical’ (A724=B752).
Such conceptual cognition pertaining to the
possibility of being given objects in empirical
intuition amounts to philosophy ‘knowing
Key Themes and Topics
its bounds’ (A727=B755). It can usefully be
interpreted as definitive of what has gener-
ally become known as ‘transcendental argu-
ments’, i.e. the identification of necessary
conditions for having experience of a certain
kind.
Kant examines definitions, axioms and
demonstrations in turn, to show that ‘none
of these elements, in the sense in which the
mathematician takes them, can be achieved
or imitated by philosophy’ (A726=B754).
A priori concepts such as those the philoso-
pher deals with, cannot be defined because
one cannot be certain that one has origi-
nally exhibited ‘the exhaustive concept of a
thing within its boundaries’ (A727=B755).
Moreover, in philosophy, there are no syn-
thetic a priori principles which are immedi-
ately certain, hence no axioms (A732=B760).
Finally, since philosophy can only ‘consider
the universal in abstracto (through concepts)’
while mathematics does this ‘in concreto (in
the individual intuition)’, demonstrations,
which are apodictic proofs in intuition, are
impossible in philosophy (A734=B762). This
concludes Kant’s case for claiming that the
dogmatic use of pure reason, based as it is
upon direct synthetic propositions from
concepts alone, ‘is inappropriate per  se’
(A737=B765). – DS/CO
Further Reading
N. Hinske, ‘Die Rolle des
Methodenproblems im Denken Kants’,
in N. Fischer (ed.), Kants Grundlegung
einer kritischen Metaphysik.
Einführung in die ‘Kritik der reinen
Vernunft’ (Hamburg: Meiner, 2010),
pp. 343–354.
A. Moore, ‘The Transcendental Doctrine
of Method’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Kant’s
232
‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010),
pp. 310–326.
D. Schulting, ‘Kant’s Copernican analogy:
beyond the non-specific reading’, Studi
Kantiani xxii (2009): 39–65.
B.-S. Wolff-Metternich, Die Überwindung
des mathematischen Erkenntnisideals.
Kants Grenzbestimmung von Mathematik
und Philosophie (Berlin/New York: de
Gruyter, 1995).
Minority → Enlightenment
Moral law → categorical
imperative
Moral worth → morality
Morality
Kant considers morality to be fundamentally
a matter of one’s reasons for choosing to act
as one does  – what he calls one’s → will  –
rather than one’s actions themselves or their
consequences. To be morally good, then, one
must not only do what is morally good, but
do so for morally good reasons, rather than
other ones.
He also holds that morally good reasons
do not ultimately concern what oneself or
others happen to need, want or enjoy as
individuals or moral authorities that one
may happen to believe in, such as God, con-
science or convention. Indeed, he holds that
morally good reasons override any such rea-
sons for doing things. For instance, he thinks
that one should be honest or help the needy
not just because it happens to benefit oneself
or others or to be considered honourable or
caring  – rather, one should do these things

because they are good in a further, universal
and unconditional way.
In Kant’s terms, to have a good will one
must act not only ‘in conformity with duty’
(→ duty, duties) but also ‘from duty’ rather
than ‘from inclination’ (G 397–399), and
one’s duties are ‘categorical imperatives’ (→
categorical imperative), rather than ‘hypothet-
ical’ ones based on contingent needs, wants,
pleasures, or authorities (G 414–420).
In G, Kant describes the reasons that make
an action morally good in terms of four for-
mulas. The first, the formula of universal law,
describes the reason for which one does a
morally good action as a reason for which one
could want all others to do the same action
in similar circumstances – in other words, it
is a reason for which one could want it to be
a ‘universal law’ (→ categorical imperative)
to do this action in these circumstances.
For example, Kant argues that it is mor-
ally wrong to make a false promise or ignore
the needy for self-interest because if every-
one were to do the same no one would trust
one’s promise or help oneself in turn, and
this would conflict with one’s self-interest.
One could not, then, want it to be a ‘uni-
versal law’ to do these things for self-inter-
ested reasons (G 402–403, 421–424; CPrR
27–28).
The second formula, the formula of the
end in itself, describes a morally good action
as one done considering each affected agent
an ‘end in itself’ (→ kingdom of ends)  –
that is, as something of such value that he
or she may not be used merely as a ‘thing’
or a ‘means’ to satisfy one’s own or others’
inclinations. Kant argues that this formula
too explains why making a false promise
or not helping the needy is morally wrong,
since a promisee could not consent to being
deceived nor a needy person accept that his
or her needs be ignored (G 427–431).
233
Key Themes and Topics
The other two formulas, those of auton-
omy (→ freedom) and the → kingdom of
ends, emphasize a corollary of this – namely,
that, since the reason for which one does a
morally good action fundamentally con-
cerns only affected agency, it is a reason
that one appreciates simply as and because
one is an agent, rather than a reason con-
cerning something else that one may or may
not appreciate. In this sense, Kant thinks
that in doing what is morally good for mor-
ally good reasons one is ‘autonomous’ or
‘self-legislating’ and constructs a systematic
‘kingdom’ of agents, reasons and actions
with other agents (G 431–436, 440–445;
CPrR 33).
In MM Kant proceeds to derive two kinds
of general moral requirements, political and
ethical. Since political requirements are those
that one can be coerced to fulfil by others,
he treats them as requirements merely to
do, refrain from, or allow certain actions,
rather than to do so for certain reasons (MM
214, 218–221, 231, 239). He identifies these
actions as those which ensure that any one
agent’s freedom of action does not impinge
on others’ equal freedom  – in his terms,
‘[a]ny action is right if it can coexist with
everyone’s freedom in accordance with a uni-
versal law’ (MM 230–233, 237–238).
He argues in particular that property
rights (→ right) to things are limited by the
finite nature of the earth, such that one per-
son’s coming to own an un-owned thing,
while necessary for his or her freedom of
action, also diminishes others’ similar free-
dom  – it follows, he claims, that we must
consider things as if they were originally
owned ‘in common’ by all affected agents.
To secure these property rights, he fur-
ther argues, we must obey a state that also
ensures our equality and consent (MM
245–270, 311–318).
Key Themes and Topics
Ethical requirements or virtues (→ virtue),
on the other hand, are requirements to rec-
ognize certain reasons for action, and Kant
claims that they consequently leave us some
playroom in terms of precisely which actions
might be considered to fulfil or neglect them
(MM 379–380, 383–384, 389–390, 394–
395). He argues that each of us is ethically
required to pursue his or her own perfection
as an agent  – by, among other things, culti-
vating mental and physical capacities and the
performance of duties simply ‘from duty’  –
and also to consider others’ needs, wants and
pleasures – particularly, given the needy nature
of human beings, by promoting what others
consider necessary for their own overall hap-
piness (MM 385–388, 391–394, 417–468).
Regarding happiness, in CPrR Kant also
argues that, since happiness is deserved only
to the extent that one is morally good, we
must postulate God as the cause of this
deserved happiness and the soul’s immortality
as allowing us to progress towards deserving
it. He calls this combination of moral good-
ness and happiness ‘the highest good’ (CPrR
107–148) (→ religion).
Along with his derivations of general moral
requirements, in MM Kant also presents our
moral reasoning in a more systematic way
than in G. Rather than simply testing specific
reasons in specific circumstances against the
formulas, as he does in discussing his exam-
ples in G, in MM he presents moral reason-
ing as a balancing of different morally good
reasons against each other.
In particular, he claims that political
requirements are to be prioritized over ethi-
cal ones and more general requirements
prioritized over more specific ones. He
derives general requirements by considering
whether general reasons  – those applicable
to human beings generally  – might be con-
sistent with the formulas in general human
234
circumstances  – such as the finite nature
of the earth or the needy nature of human
beings  – while claiming that more specific
requirements are to be derived by consider-
ing more specific reasons in more specific cir-
cumstances (MM 216–217, 224, 390–391,
403–404, 468–469; LE 536–538).
Given his emphasis on reasons for action,
however, it is notable that Kant denies that we
can ever establish with certainty whether or
not an agent acted for morally good reasons,
even in our own cases (G 406–408; TP 284–
285; MM 392–393, 441, 446–447). Indeed,
he suspects that we are often overcharitable in
attributing morally good reasons to ourselves
(G 407), limits his hopes for moral progress to
the skills and inclinations that might lead us
to do morally good actions for non-moral rea-
sons (CJ 429–445; TP 308, 310; PP 360–361,
365, 366; Anthr 324, 327–330), and even
argues that we are all evil (→ radical evil) in
the sense that, although we recognize mor-
ally good reasons, we always prioritize other
reasons over them (R 19–44). But he insists
that we can and ought always to pursue moral
goodness and to reason morally nonetheless
(G 407–408; TP 284–288; R 41, 44–45).
Kant also attempts to justify his basic
understanding of morality in two different
ways. In G he argues that we should consider
our reasoning as free (→ freedom) in the
sense of undetermined by antecedent causes,
since we need not consider ourselves merely
as objects of possible experience, subject to
determination by antecedent causes, and our
reasoning displays its freedom in producing
ideas (→ idea, ideas) that go beyond such
objects. If we consider our reasoning to be
free, he further claims, then we must also
consider it to recognize moral reasons in his
sense, since the only alternative to determi-
nation by antecedent causes is such moral
‘self-determination’ (G 446–463).

In CPrR, however, he denies that the free-
dom of our reasoning can be demonstrated
and claims simply that morality is a ‘fact
of reason’, that it implies the freedom of
our reasoning, and that this freedom can
be admitted as something beyond possi-
ble experience (CPrR 3–7, 28–33, 42–56,
93–99, 103–106). He thus leaves the ulti-
mate justification for his understanding of
morality to common sense, just as in G,
before arguing from reasoning’s freedom,
he derives this understanding from the com-
mon sense notion of the goodness of a ‘good
will’ (G 392–394, 403–405, 437, 444–445;
CPrR 8). – TB
Further Reading
H. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), esp. pts 2 and 3.
J. Timmermann, A. Reath (eds), Kant’s
Critique of Practical Reason. A Critical
Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010).
M. Timmons (ed.), Kant’s Metaphysics of
Morals: Interpretative Essays (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002).
A. Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
A. Wood, ‘The supreme principle of morality’,
in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Kant and Modern
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), pp. 342–380.
Motive, incentive (Triebfeder) →
categorical imperative
Nature → laws (of nature)/
lawfulness, natural science
235
Key Themes and Topics
Natural science
Kant’s reflections on natural science
occupy a prominent role within his tran-
scendental project and span over Kant’s
entire academic career. In his first work LF,
Kant latched onto the then ongoing debate
between Cartesians and Leibnizians on vis
viva (what we now call kinetic energy).
The engagement with → Newton’s phys-
ics began in 1755 with NH, where Kant
put forward a cosmogony ‘according to
Newtonian principles’ and explained the
formation of celestial bodies out of a pri-
mordial nebula (anticipating Laplace’s
nebular hypothesis).
From Newton’s Opticks Kant borrowed
the idea of the ether as the matter of light,
to which he added the property of being also
the matter of fire in his 1755 essay F. Scholars
have read Kant’s endorsement of Newtonian
physics as signalling his departure from
both the Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysical
dynamics and the Crusius-Knutzen theory of
→ physical influx (→ Crusius).
Against the former Kant argued in PhM,
where he defended the view that bodies
consist of physical monads as ‘spheres of
activity’, i.e. centres of attractive and repul-
sive forces. In ND, from 1755, Kant argued
against the theory of physical influx, i.e.
the Pietist school of thought that claimed
that the ground of physical change was to
be found in the bare existence of physical
substances.
Kant’s engagement with natural science
continued throughout the pre-Critical period
(see MR; DS), and culminated in the Critical
period with MFNS, published in 1786, as
an attempt to implement the transcenden-
tal apparatus developed five years earlier in
CPR. The extent to which MFNS ties in with
the Transcendental Analytic of CPR remains
Key Themes and Topics
a matter of debate (→ laws (of nature)/
lawfulness).
In the preface to MFNS, Kant distinguishes
between proper and improper natural sci-
ence. The former ‘treats its object wholly
according to a priori principles, the second
according to laws of experience’ (MFNS
468). Kant took chemistry to be an exam-
ple of the latter category, which lacked apo-
dictic certainty. Kant’s concern was instead
with proper natural science, whose apodic-
tic certainty presupposes a metaphysics of
nature, i.e. pure a priori principles underly-
ing the empirical part. Metaphysics of nature
focuses on the empirical concept of matter
and brings all the determinations of the con-
cept of matter under the a priori concepts of
the understanding (→ deduction).
The basic determination of the empirical
concept of matter is motion as the object
of outer sense (→ inner/outer sense). Hence
natural science is ultimately a doctrine of
motion and its metaphysical foundations are
brought under four chapters (Phoronomy,
Dynamics, Mechanics and Phenomenology),
corresponding respectively to the four titles
of categories: quantity, quality, relation and
modality.
Phoronomy takes motion as a ‘pure quan-
tum in accordance with its composition’
(MFNS 477). Motion is here considered
only kinematically, i.e. with respect to speed
(defined as a scalar quantity), direction and
composition of motions. Matter is consid-
ered as a material point and all motions are
rectilinear motions, whose composition with
regard to their respective speeds and direc-
tions falls under three possible cases (MFNS
490). Two motions (with equal or unequal
speeds) either (1) constitute a new motion
along the same line and the same direction
in one body; or (2) constitute a new motion
along the same line, when combining motions
236
of opposite directions; or (3) form an angle,
when motions along different rectilinear lines
are combined.
Dynamics considers motion ‘as belonging
to the quality of matter, under the name of an
original moving force’ (MFNS 477). Matter
is here defined as ‘the moveable insofar as
it fills a space’ through a particular moving
force (MFNS 496). By reasoning a priori
about properties of matter, Kant introduced
two moving forces, attraction and repulsion.
Attraction causes matter to approach other
matter. Repulsion causes matter to repel
other matter.
The repulsive force is characterized as an
original expansive force ‘also called elas-
ticity’ (MFNS 500) through which mat-
ter’s impenetrability is explained. In other
words, matter resists penetration dynami-
cally, i.e. via a force of repulsion, not via
its solidity. Kant argued that if there were
only repulsive force as an original expansive
force, matter would disperse itself to infinity.
Hence, there must be a counteracting attrac-
tive force, through which matter impels
another to approach it. On the other hand,
no attraction is possible without repulsion
because, if only attraction existed, all mat-
ter would coalesce into a point and space
would be empty. While repulsion manifests
itself as a contact force or a surface force
(via impenetrability), attraction acts at a
distance through empty space as a penetrat-
ing force.
Mechanics takes matter ‘in relation to
another through its own inherent motion’
(MFNS 477). Matter is here defined as ‘the
moveable insofar as it, as such a thing, has
moving force’ (MFNS 536). The moving
forces in this chapter are those that set matter
in motion and communicate motion between
bodies, although mechanics presupposes
dynamics – e.g. the original attractive force is

said to be ‘the cause of universal gravitation’
as a mechanical force (MFNS 541).
Kant calls mass the quantity of matter
(intended as the moveable present in a certain
space), and calls quantity of motion what is
now called momentum (i.e. the product of
mass and speed). Three laws of mechanics fol-
low (for their statements → laws (of nature)/
lawfulness). The first law is about quantity
of matter being conserved. The second law
is a version of Newton’s law of inertia, with
the important difference that Kant defined
matter’s inertia as ‘nothing else than its life-
lessness, as matter in itself’ (MFNS 544), and
does not consider inertia as the cause of a
body’s resistance (MFNS 551). The third law
is a variant of the law of action and reaction
(→ Newton).
Phenomenology ‘determines matter’s
motion or rest merely in relation to the mode
of representation or modality’ (MFNS 477).
Matter is defined as ‘the moveable insofar as
it, as such a thing, can be an object of experi-
ence’ (MFNS 554). For matter to be an object
of experience the faculty of understanding
has to determine it with respect to the predi-
cate of motion. Kant identified three pos-
sible predicates, corresponding to the three
categories of modality (possibility, actuality
and necessity). The ‘rectilinear motion of a
matter with respect to an empirical space’
(MFNS 555) is said to be a possible predi-
cate. Thus, absolute motion, as motion of
matter not with respect to an empirical space
or other matter external to it, is said to be
impossible.
Circular motion (as a continuous change
of rectilinear motion) is an actual predi-
cate. Finally, an opposite and equal motion
for every motion of a body is said to be a
necessary predicate (given the third law of
mechanics). To prove the physical impossi-
bility of empty space, Kant speculated that
237
Key Themes and Topics
the cohesion of matter could be due to the
ether distributed everywhere in the universe
(MFNS 564).
Kant’s speculations on the ether find
their ultimate expression in OP. In continu-
ity with F, the ether is identified as both the
matter of heat (also called caloric) and the
matter of light (OP-II 214). The existence of
the ether is transcendentally deduced so as
to allow the transition from the metaphysi-
cal foundations of natural science to physics
(OP-I 218). In OP, Kant’s aim was indeed to
go beyond attraction and repulsion as estab-
lished a priori in MFNS towards physics as
‘the systematic investigation of nature as
to [durch] empirically given forces of mat-
ter’ (OP-II 298). The search for a system of
empirically given forces of matter remains a
regulative idea of reason (→ regulative prin-
ciples) in line with Kant’s later view of nature
as a lawful system. – MM
Further Reading
E. Förster, Kant’s Final Synthesis
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000).
M. Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992).
M. Friedman, Kant’s Construction of Nature.
A Reading of the Metaphysical Foundations
of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013).
M. Massimi (ed.), Kant and Philosophy of
Science Today (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008).
E. Watkins (ed.), Kant and the Sciences (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
E. Watkins, Kant and the Metaphysics
of Causality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
Key Themes and Topics
Necessity
Necessity belongs – along with its opposite,
contingency  – to the categories of modal-
ity. Although only the twelfth and final cat-
egory within the table of pure concepts of the
understanding (A80=B106), necessity plays
an enormously significant role within CPR
insofar as it provides at the same time the
definition of the → a priori (B4; A633=B661).
The category necessity is derived from apo-
dictic judgments, which alone  – in contrast
to problematic judgments (of possibility) and
assertoric judgments (of actuality) – express
objective and universally valid knowledge.
In contrast to belief and opinion, → knowl-
edge consists in the awareness of necessity: ‘[W]
hat I know [. . .], I hold to be apodeictically cer-
tain, i.e., to be universally and objectively nec-
essary (holding for all).’ (JL 66) The capacity to
recognize necessities is → reason. Specifically,
reason is the faculty of drawing inferences, and
conclusions inferred always express some sort
of necessity. Strict necessity is, according to
Kant, the mark of a priori judgments.
In the Critical system, possibility cor-
responds to → form, actuality to matter;
necessity expresses the connection between
form and matter. In the case of arithmetic (→
mathematics) and → geometry, pure form
can do without matter. Leaving matter out of
account, consideration of form alone yields a
complete description of the contents of these
two sciences and their necessary truths.
By contrast, judgments in the philosophy
of nature cannot be made without reference
to matter. In this case, objects are considered
‘necessary’ when reason recognizes that they
are given in accordance with the univer-
sal laws of experience (→ laws (of nature)/
lawfulness). Accordingly, the third Postulate
of Empirical Thought reads: ‘That whose
connection with the actual is determined in
238
accordance with general conditions of expe-
rience is (exists) necessarily.’ (A218=B266)
The transcendental examination of the con-
cept of necessity in the third Postulate reduces
to the analysis of the connections of appear-
ances ‘in accordance with the dynamical law
of causality’ (B280=A228). Four principles
(in mundo non datur hiatus, saltus, casus
and fatum), which clarify again the fourfold
grouping of the categories, are structurally
constrained by the law of causality. All neces-
sity in nature is conditioned  – rather than
blind – and so all necessity is comprehensible.
The possibility of any determination of the
existence of the absolute is clearly ruled out
through the presentation of the principles of
continuity in the third Postulate. That noth-
ing can be either conceived or intuited as nec-
essary in itself by the human understanding is
demonstrated by Kant in the → Antinomies.
Necessity and objectivity are one and the
same not only in a theoretical , but also in
a practical, sense: ‘bonitas actionis est neces-
sitas obiectiva. bonitas actionis contingentis
est necessitatio obiectiva.’ (Refl 6926) In the
second note to the third section of CPrR, the
distinction between two forms of necessity
(physical and practical) – and the attendant
distinction between two different concepts of
law – is described as the single ‘most impor-
tant distinction’ to be considered in practical
investigations (CPrR 26).
This distinction in fact reflects the fundamen-
tal cleavage between the metaphysics of nature
and the metaphysics of morals, which, in the
mid-1760s, already characterized the sketch
for a new metaphysics in DSS as well as the
definition – crucial for the Critical project – of
the Third Antinomy. → freedom and necessity
exclude each other by turns, according to Kant.
In the note to the sixth section of CPrR
(directly before the introduction of the cat-
egorical imperative in §7), Kant asks how

consciousness of the moral law in general is pos-
sible (→ morality, categorical imperative). His
answer – decisive for the whole of practical phi-
losophy – is as follows: ‘We can become aware
of pure practical laws just as we are aware of
pure theoretical principles, by attending to the
necessity with which reason prescribes them to
us and to the setting aside of all empirical con-
ditions to which reason directs us.’ (CPrR 30)
Of beauty, as Kant says in §18 of CJ, one
thinks that it has a necessary connection to
satisfaction (→ aesthetic judgment). ‘[T]his
necessity is of a special kind: not a theoreti-
cal objective necessity [. . .] nor a practical
necessity [. . .]. Rather, as a necessity that is
thought in an aesthetic judgment, it can only
be called exemplary, i.e., a necessity of the
assent of all to a judgment that is regarded
as an example of a universal rule that one
cannot produce.’ (CJ 236–237) In this case
it has to do with a subjective necessity, con-
ditioned by the idea of a common sense.
According to the title of §22: ‘The neces-
sity of the universal assent that is thought
in a judgment of taste is a subjective neces-
sity, which is represented as objective under
the presupposition of a common sense.’ (CJ
239) – GM/SS
Further Reading
J. Van Cleve, Problems from Kant (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 2.
Noumenon, noumena → THING IN
ITSELF, transcendental idealism
Object, objectivity
The concept of ‘object’ (Gegenstand,
Objekt) is the centre around which Kant
239
Key Themes and Topics
has organized CPR. At a crucial stage in the
argument of the → deduction Kant defines
an object as ‘that in the concept of which
the manifold of a given intuition is united’
(B137). In the A-Deduction, Kant speaks of
the ‘transcendental object’, as ‘that which
in all our empirical concepts in general can
provide relation to an object, i.e., objective
reality’ (A109). But this definition is not the
premise of Kant’s argument. The objectiv-
ity of knowledge, and so what is an object
at all, is the key point that must rather be
explained.
Although Kant formulated the Critical
problem formally in terms of the general
question how synthetic judgments a priori
could be possible (B19)  – which represent
the kind of knowledge that especially meta-
physics presupposes  – his explanation of
human knowledge is in fact both broader
and deeper than an analysis of synthetic a
priori judgment.
It is in the Transcendental Deduction of
the categories (TD) that Kant demonstrates
that the whole project turns on the expla-
nation of the aspect of the → synthesis of
representations as an essential element in
human knowledge. Without synthesis our
representations would be a chaotic stream
of impressions. → Knowledge of an object
in the strong sense is reflected in the type of
‘synthesis’ of representations that is found in
a → judgment as such. The essential step lies
in determining the implications of the objec-
tive unity of a synthesis of representations as
distinguished from a merely subjective con-
nection of representations (cf. B136–142)
(→ apperception), which is based solely on
the laws of association of the human mind
as they had been explained by David →
Hume.
Hume distinguished two kinds of proposi-
tion that relate to two areas of knowledge:
Key Themes and Topics
relations between matters of fact and rela-
tions of ideas. He concluded that the nature
of the certainty of the knowledge of mat-
ters of fact is of a completely different kind
from that of pure relations of ideas as such.
Hume showed at any rate that there is no
strictly logical or a priori explanation pos-
sible of relations of matters of fact but only
a psychological reference to a tendency of
the mind to assume a → necessity of sorts in
the sequence of factual events. The character
of the ‘necessary connection’ of some cause
and some effect is, however, logically always
contingent.
By contrast, Kant thinks he must bring the
problem to another level and interpret the
problem in terms of a → transcendental foun-
dation of the objectivity of human knowledge
that is to be distinguished from an explana-
tion in terms of the laws of association of the
mind. For Kant, the central question is: What
is the formal character, the meaning, and
implication of an objective unity of represen-
tations in a synthetic judgment?
In §19 of the B-version of TD (B140–142),
Kant focuses on the fact that through the cop-
ula ‘is’ a judgment shows its intrinsic inten-
tional character that is entirely missed when
one explains the objectivity expressed in a
judgment in terms of a contingent association
of ideas, as Hume does. A judgment, which
is in essence ‘synthetic’  – all judgments ulti-
mately rest on a synthesis of concepts – and
is ‘nothing other than the way to bring given
cognitions to the objective unity of appercep-
tion’ (B141), means something different from
a merely subjectively linked succession of
representations.
The concepts in a judgment function as
subject and predicate in relation to each
other and as such in relation to an object
that is ‘thought’ or determined as to its
own character. Judgment, in itself, means
240
thinking something as an ‘object’. The con-
cept of object has its own import as Kant
stresses constantly against Hume: it implies
‘thinking’ something, thinking something
formally as ‘determined’, that is, as some-
thing that is such and such for me. For Kant,
judgment and object thus are intimately
connected.
In this context, Kant focuses on the role
of the self, more in particular, the way I
myself am ‘implicated’ in the formal anal-
ysis of the objectivity of knowledge (→
apperception). He is not interested in what
I accomplish actively in the construction
of propositions but rather in the way that
something is thought as an ‘objective unity’
or as an object ‘for me’ (B138). This ‘me’
or this form of self-consciousness does not
refer to a kind of self-perception whereby
I am involved in or literally know my own
different acts. The ‘me’ that is crucial in this
case is the ‘me’ that is just ‘implicated’, so to
speak, in the ‘objective character’ of some-
thing that is thought as something (for me).
Put differently, it is a ‘me’ that is derivative
of the determination of the object. This ‘me’
is always essentially ‘implicit’ in the concep-
tion of an object.
Thus, Kant’s argument in §§17 and 19 of
TD stresses the ‘immanent’ strong connection
between the concept of ‘object’ and a kind
of self-consciousness that does not imply an
empirical soul-substance but functions only
as a ‘relational’ concept of sorts in the formal
analysis of objectivity. 
Importantly, Kant associates objects with
appearances (→ appearance) as the only things
that can be known, in contrast to things in
themselves (→ thing in itself; transcendental
idealism). This is of course connected with his
view of objects as functions of judgment, and
hence as dependent on the subjective condi-
tions of thought. – KJB

Further Reading
H. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.
An Interpretation and Defense, revised and
enlarged edition (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2004), ch. 7, esp. pts I and II.
Objective unity → object/
objectivity, apperception,
synthesis
Ontology → metaphysics
Ontological proof → proofs of
the existence of God
Outer sense → inner/outer sense
Paralogisms
In the section ‘Paralogisms of Pure Reason’,
Kant attacks the extravagant claims of
rational psychology. Rational → psychol-
ogy, as a discipline that purports to offer a
priori cognition of the human soul in par-
ticular, was first introduced among the top-
ics of → metaphysics by → Wolff, though
Kant directs his criticism in the chapter
rather widely, targeting claims by a number
of thinkers, including → Descartes and →
Mendelssohn, on topics of long-standing
philosophical interest, such as the soul’s sub-
stantiality and simplicity.
Kant can be seen to adopt a twofold
strategy against the rational psychologist.
First, he disputes the particular metaphysi-
cal claims made about the soul, arguing
that they cannot be taken to be informative
about the soul’s nature insofar as the idea
of the soul has no other grounding than the
‘I think’.
241
Key Themes and Topics
Second, Kant conjectures diagnostically
that the basis for the rational psychologist’s
error in thinking that a merely logical sub-
ject (the ‘I’ of the ‘I think’) (→ apperception)
could constitute the foundation for synthetic
cognition lies in transcendental illusion in
accordance with which that subject naturally
seems to be a real subject of thinking.
Through each of the four paralogisms pre-
sented in the chapter, Kant attempts to show
that a central metaphysical claim on the part
of the rational psychologist is in fact the
conclusion of a formally invalid argument.
In particular, Kant thinks the reasoning
offered by the rational psychologist suffers
from a fallacy of equivocation inasmuch as
a concept is made use of in different senses
throughout the argument.
For example, in the First Paralogism, the
rational psychologist supplies the following
argument for the substantiality of the soul:
[1] That the representation of which is the
absolute subject of our judgments, and
hence cannot be used as the determina-
tion of another thing, is substance.
[2] I , as thinking being, am the absolute sub-
ject of all my possible judgments, and this
representation of Myself cannot be used
as the predicate of any other thing.
[3] Thus I, as thinking being (soul), am sub-
stance. (A348)
According to Kant, in the major premise
(1) the concept of substance is made use of
in its transcendental signification, that is, in
the sense in which it would apply to things
in general, whereas in the minor premise (2)
and conclusion (3) the same concept is made
use of in its empirical signification, that is, as
it would apply to things as they appear.
This latter use is unwarranted, however,
since we have no sensible intuition of the
soul that might ground it. This makes the
Key Themes and Topics
syllogism a paralogism, or an inference that
is false according to its → form (cf. JL 135;
§90) (→ logic); thus, the rational psycholo-
gist cannot pretend to offer synthetic cogni-
tion of the soul’s substantiality in this way.
Kant adheres to this general line of criti-
cism throughout the Paralogisms, but he also
spares room for attacking the inferences that
the rational psychologist sought to draw
from these initial claims.
In the Second Paralogism, Kant tackles the
traditional argument for the soul’s simplic-
ity, namely, that a unified thought requires a
single unifying thinker, pointing out that this
argument rests on an unfounded claim that
a multitude of representations must be con-
tained in a single thinking subject to consti-
tute a thought. In addition, Kant disputes the
cogency of the rational psychologist’s further
inference from the soul’s simplicity to its
immateriality, arguing that while the soul’s
simplicity might distinguish it from matter
considered as an appearance, it cannot serve
to distinguish it from the ground of matter
considered as it is in itself.
In the Third Paralogism, Kant takes issue
with the rational psychologist’s demonstra-
tion of the soul’s personality, where this is
understood as its capacity to be ‘conscious of
the numerical identity of its Self in different
times’ (A361). Although Kant allows that we
are, through transcendental → apperception,
conscious of our own numerical → iden-
tity through all time, he rejects the rational
psychologist’s claim that this amounts to an
empirical consciousness of our persistence
through time and, as such, a synthetic cogni-
tion of the soul’s personality. Together, these
criticisms undermine the rational psycholo-
gist’s attempts to demonstrate the soul’s
immortality, where this consists in the soul’s
incorruptibility and continued personality
after death.
242
Finally, in the Fourth Paralogism Kant
considers the rational psychologist’s argu-
ment for the ideality of external things inso-
far as the existence of these things, unlike
that of the soul, is known only mediately.
Against this, Kant argues that his own
doctrine of → transcendental idealism, in
accordance with which things in space and
time ‘are all together to be regarded as mere
representations and not as things in them-
selves’ (A369) allows for the immediate per-
ception of external things (inasmuch as they
are mere representations). However, in the
→ Refutation of Idealism added to the sec-
ond edition of CPR, Kant offers a different
line of argument.
Kant recognized that, in order to be
persuasive, he must also explain how it is
that the rational psychologist could have
been misled into thinking that a merely
formal representation could be the object
of synthetic cognition. This is precisely the
role of Kant’s doctrine of transcendental
illusion (→ Dialectic), as he claims that
the soul naturally and unavoidably seems
to be given empirically, giving rise to the
temptation to take ‘the unity in the synthe-
sis of thoughts for a perceived unity in the
subject of these thoughts’ (A402; emphasis
added).
It is precisely insofar as the soul holds
out the illusory appearance of being given
in inner → intuition that Kant thinks it
serves as the ‘transcendental ground for
inferring falsely’ (A341=B399) on the part
of the rational psychologist. Having fallen
prey to this illusion, the rational psycholo-
gist subsequently takes the subsumption
of the soul under a category in its empiri-
cal signification to be warranted, and Kant
will allow nonetheless that there is a sense
in which the soul can be understood to be
a simple, identical substance, though only

insofar as these concepts are taken in their
transcendental significations. Even then,
however, these claims are not inferred of the
soul but lie ‘already in every thought itself’
(A354). – CD
Further Reading
K. Ameriks, Kant’s Theory of Mind: An
Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure
Reason, new edition (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2000).
C. Dyck, Kant and Rational Psychology
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
U. Thiel, ‘The critique of rational
psychology’, in G. Bird (ed.), A
Companion to Kant (Malden, MA/
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010),
pp. 207–221.
J. Wuerth, ‘The Paralogisms of Pure Reason’,
in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Kant’s ‘Critique of
Pure Reason’ (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), pp. 210–244.
Peace → cosmopolitan,
cosmopolitanism
Perception → experience,
Anticipations of Perception,
Analogies of Experience,
representation
Phenomen(a)(on) →
transcendental idealism
Physico-theological proof →
proofs of the existence of God
Pleasure → aesthetic judgment
243
Key Themes and Topics
Postulates of Empirical
Thought in General
The Postulates of Empirical Thought in
General (A218–235=B265–287) are the
fourth group of synthetic a priori princi-
ples of experience, next to the → Axioms
of Intuition and the → Anticipations of
Perception, which are also called the math-
ematical principles, and the → Analogies of
Experience, which are called the dynamic
principles (B199=A160). The Postulates
deal with the schematized (→ schematism)
categories of modality ‘possibility’, ‘actual-
ity’ and ‘necessity’, that is, with the restric-
tion of them to their merely empirical use
(A219=B266). Kant refers to the postulates as
mere regulative principles, like the Analogies
of Experience, but the way in which the pos-
tulates are applied as principles is very differ-
ent from both the Analogies and the Axioms.
Whereas the previous set of principles
dealt with the manner in which the sche-
matized categories are related to appear-
ances (→ appearance), or objects (→ object),
directly, the aim of the postulates is to expli-
cate the manner in which the modal concepts
of the understanding ‘express the relation
of the concept to the faculty of knowledge’
(A219=B266; emphasis added). That is to
say, the postulates concern the ways in which
objects are assumed to exist in relation to the
subject of knowledge. Unlike the other prin-
ciples, the postulates thus do not make any
claims as to how objects of → experience are
constituted themselves or how objects relate
to each other. Rather, they express whether, in
relation to our subjective cognitive capacity,
an object of our cognition is to be regarded
as ‘possible’, as ‘actual’ or as ‘necessary’. The
principles of modality thus do not ‘augment’
the concept of a thing; hence, they can be
called postulates (A234–235=B287).
Key Themes and Topics
The first postulate concerns the application
of the category of possibility in an empiri-
cal judgment: that is possible ‘which agrees
with the formal conditions of experience’
(A218=B265). Kant is concerned to show
how for something to be a possible object of
knowledge at all, it must at least fall under
the general formal conditions of knowledge,
that is, the forms of → intuition, space and
time (→ Transcendental Aesthetic), and the
categories (→ deduction).
The postulate of the actuality of things is
bound up with ‘the material conditions of
experience (of sensation)’ (A218=B266); an
object must be given a posteriori in a sensible
intuition and must thus be sensibly perceived,
for any concept of an object, in accordance
with the categories, to be about a really
existing object (B268–269=A221–222).
‘Perception [ . . . ] is the sole characteristic
of actuality’ (A225=B273). The postulate
of actuality thus concerns the requirement
of ‘the connection of the object with some
actual experience, in accordance with the
analogies of experience’ (B272=A225).
The third postulate concerns the way the
category of necessity is to be schematized in
connection ‘with the actual as determined
in accordance with universal conditions of
experience’ (A218=B266). That is to say, the
third postulate unites the two postulates of
possibility and actuality, and thus indicates
that, necessarily, we can only have knowl-
edge of actual objects that conform to the
conditions of possible experience.
The schematization of the concept of
possibility relates to the formal subjective
conditions of experience that enable objec-
tive experience. Hence, it is different from
a merely logical understanding of possibil-
ity, which would only involve the absence
of contradiction, i.e. that the thought of an
object does not contradict the formal rules of
244
thinking. This alone, however, does nothing
to help us understand whether something is
objectively or really possible. Whether some-
thing is objectively or really possible involves
‘the conditions of space and of its determina-
tion’ (A221=B268), which is as much as to
say that to grasp the real possibility of some-
thing requires seeing it as standing under the
formal conditions of intuition, as well as the
concepts of the understanding that concern
quantity, quality and relation and determine
what is given in intuition.
The important point with the postulate of
the actuality of things is that any cognition of
a thing must be mediated by our perceptions,
also when it is something objective that can-
not immediately be perceived by means of
the senses, such as a magnetic field, whose
existence must be inferred from its connec-
tion with actual perceptions within possible
experience (cf. B521=A493), i.e. that ‘mag-
netic matter’ really exists can be inferred
from the existence of perceivable ‘attracted
iron filings’ (B273=A226), for which only a
magnetic field could be responsible.
It is at this point in his discussion of the
postulates that Kant refers to previous sys-
tems of idealist thought (in particular →
Descartes), which have cast serious doubts
over the existence of external objects and
over the fact that we immediately perceive
objects in experience, as Kant has pointed
out in his discussion of the postulate of actu-
ality. Such external world scepticism would
threaten to undermine the Critical principles
of experience, which is the main reason why
Kant inserts a section on the → Refutation of
Idealism in the B-version of CPR, in which he
attempts to allay the sceptical worry, before
turning to the postulate of → necessity.
By the postulate of necessity, Kant means
that ‘it pertains to material necessity in exist-
ence’, and ‘not [to] the merely formal and

logical necessity in the connection of con-
cepts’ (B279=A226). That is, any really exist-
ing object can only be known through the
perception of it in conformity with ‘general
laws of experience’ (B279=A227), more par-
ticularly ‘in accordance with laws of causality’
(B279=A227). This means that the existence
of the object cannot be known ‘fully a priori’
(B279=A226). Kant maintains that the neces-
sity of which we have knowledge only con-
cerns the relation between actual appearances,
so that we only know the necessity of ‘effects
in nature’ (A227=B280). Therefore, the pos-
tulate of necessity is only about the hypotheti-
cal necessity of the relation between objects
of possible experience, not about the absolute
necessity of the existence of things. – NH/DS
Further Reading
P. Guyer, ‘The Postulates of Empirical
Thinking in Genreal and the Refutation
of Idealism’, in G. Mohr, M. Willaschek
(eds), Immanuel Kant. Kritik der reinen
Vernunft, in the series Klassiker Auslegen
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998), pp.
297–324.
G. Motta, Die Postulate des empirischen
Denkens überhaupt (Berlin/New York: de
Gruyter, 2012).
Principle of identity of
indiscernibles → identity
Principle of (non-)
contradiction
In the ‘Introduction’ to CPR, in the section ‘On
the division of general logic into analytic and
dialectic’, Kant clarifies his understanding of
→ truth and agrees with the traditional notion
of truth as correspondence or ‘agreement of
245
Key Themes and Topics
cognition with its object’ (B82=A58). This is
what in scholastic philosophy is known as the
dictum veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus.
This nominal definition of truth is granted by
Kant, although it does not provide ‘the general
and certain criterion of the truth of any cogni-
tion’ (ibid.; emphasis added). Kant asks what
it is that makes the intellect correspond to the
→ object of → knowledge.
The difficulty with determining a criterion
of truth is that it must at the same time be
general to be valid for all objects and be par-
ticular so as to hold for any particular object,
the content with which truth is precisely con-
cerned. To ask ‘a sufficient and yet at the
same time general sign of truth’ (A58=B83)
seems a tall order.
Kant therefore distinguishes between the
content or matter and → form of cognition,
and accordingly makes a distinction between
‘material (objective) truth’ (A60=B85) and
‘the form of truth’ (A59=B84), with which
not two kinds of truth are meant but two
formally separable aspects of truth. This is
to avoid ‘a material use of the merely formal
principles of pure understanding through
empty sophistries’ (A63=B88).
The ‘merely logical criterion of truth,
namely the agreement of a cognition with
the general and formal laws of understand-
ing and reason’ (A59=B84) is the principle
of non-contradiction, or the principle of
contradiction as Kant labels it. The princi-
ple amounts to the thought that ‘no predi-
cate pertains to a thing that contradicts
it’ (B190=A151). In modern parlance: of
some a of which is asserted F cannot also
be asserted ¬F. It is the ‘conditio sine qua
non’ or ‘negative condition of all truth’
(A59–60=B84; cf. B190=A151). But ‘for all
that a judgment may be free of any internal
contradiction, it can still be either false or
groundless’ (A151=B190).
Key Themes and Topics
The first use of the principle is thus a nega-
tive one, i.e. in order ‘to ban falsehood and
error’, which makes it a necessary condi-
tion of all thought. But it also serves a posi-
tive role, as it is the sufficient condition for
analytic → judgment (A151=B190–191; cf.
P 267), ‘[f]or the contrary of that which as
a concept already lies and is thought in the
cognition of the object is always correctly
denied, while the concept itself must nec-
essarily be affirmed of it, since its opposite
would contradict the object’ (ibid.).
But the principle cannot be used mate-
rially; it is not sufficient for objective
cognition. Some other principle must be pre-
supposed which will provide the sufficient
ground of knowledge (→ principle of suffi-
cient reason).
In one of his earliest works, ND, Kant
elaborated on the supreme principle of
metaphysics and made the case for two
reciprocal principles, the principle of
affirmative truths (‘whatever is, is’) and
one for negative truths (‘whatever is not,
is not’), which basically come down to one
supreme principle, namely the principle of
→ identity (ND 389), on which the prin-
ciple of contradiction, viz. the principle
of negative truths, is based. Incidentally,
in ND Kant still formulates the principle
of contradiction in quasi-temporal terms
that he refutes in CPR: ‘[I]t is impos-
sible that the same thing should simul-
taneously be and not be.’ (ND 391; cf.
B191–193=A152–153) – DS
Principle of sufficient reason
There is a reason for everything that is.
In Proposition IV of ND (ND 392), Kant
takes aim at the main support of Wolffian
246
rationalism (→ Wolff) insofar as he breaks
the principle of sufficient reason (principium
rationis determinantis, vulgo sufficientis)
down into (1) the principle of antecedently
determining grounds  – the ‘reason why’
(ratio cur), or the ‘ground of being or com-
ing to be’ (ratio fiendi vel existendi) – and (2)
the principle of consequentially determining
grounds – the ‘ground that’ (ratio quod), or
‘ground of knowing’ (ratio cognoscendi).
Kant asserts the necessary validity of the
principle of the determination of a thing
through its cause: ‘Nothing which exists
contingently can be without a ground which
determines its existence antecedently.’ (ND
396; heading) At the end of the work, Kant
derives two further principles from the prin-
ciple of sufficient reason: the principle of suc-
cession (Proposition XII) and the principle of
co-­existence (Proposition XIII).
In the Critical period, the principle of
sufficient reason loses its ontological char-
acter and is construed as the fundamental
a priori principle of the determination of
the possibility of → experience itself. This
idea is clearly anticipated in several reflec-
tions from the so-called Duisburg Nachlass
(1774–1775): ‘Everything that happens [. .
.] cannot be specifically determined in the
time in which it occurs except by means of
a rule. [. . .] Thus the principle of sufficient
reason is a principium of the rule of experi-
ence, namely for ordering it.’ (Refl 4680; cf.
Refl 4682)
Ontology as the science of things in them-
selves is impossible, according to Kant, and
‘must give way to the modest [. . .] analytic of
the pure understanding’ (B303=A247). The
Transcendental Analytic is meant to show
that true, discursive knowledge of things is
nevertheless possible. The principle of suf-
ficient reason cannot, strictly speaking, be
proven (see A783=B811). But Kant singles out

the proof of the principle of causality in the
Second Analogy of Experience (→ Analogies
of Experience) as a surrogate for a proof of
the principle of sufficient reason: ‘All altera-
tions occur in accordance with the law of the
connection of cause and effect.’ (B232) Kant
regards this as the most important condition
for the possibility of the objects of experi-
ence: ‘Thus the principle of sufficient reason
is the ground of possible experience, namely
the objective cognition of appearances with
regard to their relation in the successive series
of time.’ (A200–201=B246) – GM/SS
Further Reading
B. Longuenesse, ‘Kant’s deconstruction of
the principle of sufficient reason’, in Kant
on the Human Standpoint (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005),
pp. 117–142.
Productive imagination →
imagination, synthesis
Proof
Within the ‘Systematic Representation of all
Synthetic Principles of Pure Understanding’
(A158=B197) Kant presents the proof of
the → Axioms of Intuition, the proof of the
→ Anticipations of Perception and the three
proofs of the → Analogies of Experience.
The possibility of attaining, synthetically
and a priori, to certain → knowledge of
things must be established here. Only
by this means can thorough and orderly
knowledge of things arise. Kant explains
later in the Discipline of Pure Reason:
‘Without attention to this the proofs, like
water breaking its banks, run wildly across
247
Key Themes and Topics
the country, wherever the tendency of hid-
den association may happen to lead them.’
(A783=B811)
Such → transcendental proofs are subject
to completely different constraints than are
the synthetic a priori principles of → math-
ematics, which can be drawn immediately
from → pure → intuition (cf. A782=B810).
Transcendental proofs amount to nothing
more than a demonstration that without cer-
tain connecting concepts of the understand-
ing → experience itself, and consequently the
objects of experience, would not be possible.
But this does not imply that transcendental
proofs are directed towards objects. Rather,
they are meant to establish ‘the objective
validity of the concepts and the possibility
of their synthesis a priori’ (A782=B810) (→
deduction).
As a precaution against the dogmatic use
of → reason, Kant lays down three rules to
be observed in the carrying out of philosoph-
ical proofs:
(1) N o transcendental proofs may be
attempted ‘without having first consid-
ered whence one can justifiably derive the
principles on which one intends to build’
(A786=B814).
(2) There can be only one proof for
any transcendental proposition (see
A787=B815ff.).
(3) S uch proofs must not be ‘apagogic’
(disproving the opposite), but rather
‘ostensive’ (making evident the truth
of the transcendental proposition
directly). This yields not only certainty,
but also insight into the sources (the
objective ground) of the certainty (see
A789=B817ff.).
The three main divisions of the → Dialectic,
viz. the → Paralogisms, the → Antinomies
and the Ideal of Pure Reason (→ transcenden-
tal ideal, proofs of the existence of God) are
Key Themes and Topics
devoted to exposing the counterfeit proofs of
pure reason which violate these three rules
each in their own way. – GM/SS
Proofs of the existence of God
Kant’s justly famous critique of the physico-
theological, cosmological and especially
ontological proofs of God’s existence is
best known in its Critical version published
in CPR (A583–A642=B611–670). But it is
preceded by an at least as equally important
version of his critique of the proofs in OPD,
published some 18 years earlier, which in turn
is preceded, by some eight years, by a short
argument similar in nature in Proposition
VII in ND 395–396. Other than in CPR, in
ND and OPD Kant still thinks it possible to
provide what he considers the only possible
ground for a positive proof of God’s exist-
ence, which as such does not reappear in
CPR.
OPD is important for various reasons.
Historically, Kant’s famous belief that
existence is not a predicate finds its first
expression here (OPD 72). Secondly, for
a systematic understanding of Kant’s piv-
otal claims regarding material possibility in
the section on the → transcendental ideal
(A571–583=B579–611), which precedes the
discussion of the actual proofs, one must
have recourse to the core argument of OPD,
to which it is heavily indebted. The argument
from possibility, which Kant presents in OPD,
is refashioned in such a way that an inference
from the necessity that something absolutely
necessary exists to God as the unique exem-
plification of this is no longer deemed valid
in its Critical version.
In OPD, the ground for a proof of God’s
existence is thus offered on the basis of an
248
argument from possibility. Kant argues that
although absolutely necessary existence or
being cannot be explained purely by means
of the → principle of (non-)contradiction,
which concerns what he calls the ‘internal
possibility’ of concepts (OPD 77), absolutely
necessary existence can be inferred from the
necessary ‘material element’ of the possibil-
ity of conceivability. The former rests on the
logical → necessity in the predicates entailing
that what is self-contradictory is absolutely
impossible, and the latter concerns the suf-
ficient condition of the conceivability of con-
cepts, or their ‘absolute real necessity’ (OPD
82). By this latter, Kant means that there
must be something given for what is conceiv-
able for if material possibility is annulled,
then all possibility is annulled. That is to say,
if nothing exists, then nothing is possible. Of
course, one can deny the existence of a single
contingent thing, but one cannot consistently
deny all existence. Although, as Kant says,
‘there is no internal [logical, D.S.] contradic-
tion in the negation of all existence’ (OPD
78; emphasis added), ‘[o]n the other hand, to
say that there is a possibility and yet nothing
real at all is self-contradictory’. Therefore,
necessarily something exists for there to be
something to be possibly thought for if ‘all
existence is denied, then all possibility is can-
celled as well’ (OPD 79).
Kant then proceeds to argue, not entirely
convincingly, for the existence of an abso-
lutely necessary being; in one of its versions,
the argument runs as follows:
[1] All possibility presupposes something
actual in and through which all that can
be thought [alles Denkliche] is given.
[2] Therefore, there is a certain actuality, the
cancellation of which would itself cancel
all internal possibility whatever.

[3] But that, the cancellation of which eradi-
cates all possibility, is absolutely neces-
sary [schlechterdings nothwendig].
[4] Therefore, something exists absolutely
necessarily [absolut nothwendiger Weise].
(OPD 83; trans. amended)
From thereon, Kant argues that only one
being can fit the bill of absolutely neces-
sary existence and that it has all the nec-
essary characteristics that in fact define
the idea of God, among which there is
supreme reality, which is the ‘real ground’
upon which ‘all possible reality’ is depend-
ent (OPD 85).
The pre-Critical Kant thus thinks it still
justified to infer from the necessity of an
absolutely necessary being, which is an ens
realissimum, to the absolutely necessary
existence of God as its personification. But
the Critical Kant of CPR no longer deems
the inference valid or indeed that there must
be some being (cf. A586–587=B614–615;
cf. A675=B703) that absolutely necessarily
exists, rather than is ‘a mere creature of [rea-
son’s] own thinking’ (A584=B612), an ‘ens
rationis’ (A681=B709). Nonetheless, Kant
continues to believe that reason quite natu-
rally seeks an ‘immovable rock of the abso-
lutely necessary’, which serves as that which
‘alone can complete series of conditions
carried out to their grounds’ (A584=B612),
and to which ‘the concept of a being hav-
ing the highest reality would be best suited’
(A586=B614) (→ Dialectic).
In OPD, before going on to offer his posi-
tive argument, detailed above, Kant first
introduces his central, and most famous,
argument that existence is not a predicate –
an argument also central to the account con-
cerning the impossibility of the ontological
proof in CPR – and that any proof of God’s
existence cannot be based on the premise
that a denial of God’s existence would be
249
Key Themes and Topics
conceptually or logically contradictory (OPD
81). Kant makes an important distinction
between the relation between the predicates
of a thing and the relation of the existing
thing to the subject that judges about the
thing. This latter relation is what Kant calls
the absolute positing of the thing with all its
predicates (OPD 82).
If I assert the proposition ‘God is omni­
potent’, then it is only the logical relation
between concepts that is thought, since it
is an explanation of the concept ‘God’. No
existence of God is thereby posited (OPD
74). It is a true judgment, even if one were
not to acknowledge God’s existence. By con-
trast, the judgment ‘God exists’, or ‘God is an
existent thing’ (OPD 74), is not the expres-
sion of a relation between a predicate and the
subject term of a judgment. More properly –
and herein Kant’s analysis of existence shows
to be a clear precursor of the modern notion
of existential quantification  – one should
analyze this judgment as stating ‘Something
existent is God’, or more precisely, ‘[T]o
an existing thing belong those predicates,
which taken together we designate by means
of the expression “God”’ (OPD 74; trans.
amended). This analysis is repeated in CPR.
Importantly, against what he takes to be
the traditional ontological argument Kant
points out that, once something is posited as
existent, existence is not a predicate added
to the totality of predicates that a possible
thing possesses; ‘nothing more is posited in
an existent thing than is posited in a merely
possible one’ (OPD 75), although of course
‘more is posited through an existent thing’,
that is, an actual thing is more than a pos-
sible thing, because this ‘involves the abso-
lute positing of the thing itself as well’ (OPD
75; cf. Kant’s Critical account of the hundred
actual thalers compared to hundred possible
thalers at A599=B627).
Key Themes and Topics
A very similar, albeit much condensed
and less clear, argument is offered in CPR
when Kant addresses the transcendental or
ontological proof (A594ff.=B622ff.; see also
LPöl, which are from the period after the
publication of the first edition of CPR). In
Kant’s view, the classical a priori proof that
existence cannot be denied of the highest
reality, namely God, on pain of contradic-
tion can be dismissed on the grounds that a
distinction must be heeded between absolute
positing and the relative (logical) positing of
concepts, the latter of which entails that pos-
iting the subject while at the same time can-
celling the predicate that belongs essentially
to it is contradictory but the former of which
can perfectly well be negated without a con-
tradiction ensuing. So existence as belonging
to a highest reality, which is an absolutely
necessary being, cannot be proved purely on
the basis of the principle of non-contradic-
tion. Also, the ontological argument, if it is
presumed to be analytic, crucially rests on a
conflation of the categories of ‘reality’ and
‘existence’ (A597=B625). At any rate, the
attempt ‘to think existence through the pure
category alone’, without having recourse to
a posteriori experience, makes it impossible
to ‘assign any mark distinguishing it from
mere possibility’ (A601=B629).
Next to the one transcendental, i.e. a pri-
ori, argument Kant considers the two classical
a posteriori arguments, i.e. the cosmological
and physico-theological proofs (which Kant
had also addressed in OPD).
The cosmological proof is a proof that
argues from contingency to an absolutely
necessary being, referred to by Kant as
→ Leibniz’s ‘proof a contingentia mundi’
(A604=B632). In his presentation of the
argument, Kant however does not mention
contingency, although he does refer to it in a
footnote to the proof, which he circumscribes
250
in succinct form as follows: ‘[1] If something
exists, then an absolutely necessary being
also has to exist. [2] Now I myself, at least,
exist; [3] therefore, an absolutely necessary
being exists.’ (ibid.) Kant says that ‘the minor
premise contains an experience’, whereas the
inference is from experience to ‘the existence
of something necessary’. In the footnote to
this passage, Kant indicates that in its classical
formulation the proof is indeed concerned to
show that ‘everything contingent must have
a cause, which, if it in turn is contingent,
must likewise have its cause, until the series
of causes [. . .] has to end with an absolutely
necessary cause, without which it would have
no completeness’ (A605=B633n.).
According to Kant, the force of the cosmo-
logical proof rests on the ontological proof,
which makes the reference to experience in
its premise in fact superfluous. And since the
ontological proof has been dismissed, Kant
does not think that the cosmological proof
succeeds either.
The ostensible difference with the onto-
logical argument is that the cosmological
argument is not an a priori proof but neither
is it empirical in the same way that the phys-
ico-theological is, which ‘uses observations
about the particular constitution of this sen-
sible world of ours for its ground of proof’
(A605=B633).
The physico-theological proof
(A620ff.=B648ff.) draws Kant’s praise but
as with the foregoing proofs he argues that
it must be rejected as a philosophical proof.
The proof, today often referred to as the
argument from design, is premised on the
observation that the world shows clear signs
of ‘immeasurable [. . .] manifoldness, order,
purposiveness, and beauty’ that can only
be explained by an order that pertains con-
tingently to the world and which therefore
points to a ‘sublime and wise’ (A625=B653)

unitary self-subsisting cause external to the
world as well as proportionate to it.
But despite its popular reputation, which
Kant is loath to ridicule, there is a fatal
flaw in the physico-theological proof since
it moves from anthropomorphic reasoning
based on empirical experience to the postu-
lation of a highest being, God, whose deter-
minate concept it cannot establish and for
which it must have recourse to the a priori,
ontological proof. Also, the physico-theo-
logical proof could only establish that there
must be an architect, not that he is also the
creator of the world.
Kant thus dismisses all of the above proofs,
which he thinks exhaust the possible kinds of
theoretical proof of God’s existence. The con-
cept of a highest being can only function as a
‘regulative principle of reason’ (A619=B647)
(→ regulative principles). He does however
proffer a positive argument for the necessary
postulation of God in CPrR and CJ based
on moral and, in the latter case, also natural
teleology.
In CJ (441–442), Kant argues that the
concept of a supreme intelligence, by anal-
ogy with human intelligence, is required to
be able to conceive of the ‘purposive arrange-
ments’ of nature, given the way our discur-
sive faculties are constituted, although this
concept cannot be theoretically determined
to pertain to an actual intelligent designer
(→ teleology).
In CPrR, in chapter 5 of section 2 of the
Dialectic (CPrR 124–132), Kant aims to
undergird the moral teleology that assures
that the moral world and the realm of nature
can be seen to coincide by postulating God’s
existence. Only the actuality of ‘a highest
original good, namely of the existence of
God’ (CPrR 125) is the guarantee ‘for a nec-
essary connection between the morality and
the proportionate happiness of a being [. . .]
251
Key Themes and Topics
who [. . .] cannot by his own powers make
it harmonize thoroughly with his practical
principles’ (CPrR 124–125; cf. CJ 442ff.) (→
morality, religion).
Lastly, in OP Kant makes the prima facie
new claim that the God of moral theol-
ogy only exists as a moral postulate (OP-II
116) and that the notion of God designates
no ‘substance different from man’ (OP-I
21). – DS
Further Reading
P. Byrne, Kant on God (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2007), chs 2, 3 and 5.
A. Chignell, ‘Kant, modality, and the most
real being’, Archiv für Geschichte der
Philosophie 91,2 (2009): 157–192.
W. Forgie, ‘Kant and existence. Critique of
Pure Reason A600/B628’, Kant–Studien
99 (2008): 1–12.
L. Kreimendahl, ‘Einleitung’ to I. Kant,
Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu
einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes,
ed. L. Kreimendahl & M. Oberhausen
(Hamburg: Meiner, 2011), pp.
XIII–CXXIX.
J. Van Cleve, Problems from Kant (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999),
ch. 12.
A. Wood, Kant’s Rational Theology (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2009
[1978]).
Psychology
For Kant, the object of its investigation
defines the discipline of psychology, which
is the thinking subject (A334=B391). While
Kant negotiates the diverse views of → Wolff,
→ Baumgarten, → Meier, → Locke, → Hume
Key Themes and Topics
and → Tetens in developing his concept of
psychology, his own inquiries into the cogni-
tive capacities of human beings occurs at an
extremely abstract level. Instead of examin-
ing the particular mechanisms of memory or
imaginative visualization, Kant is interested
in the capacities of the human mind insofar
as they are considered as basic powers of →
representation (e.g. A86=B118).
For Kant, human beings are both recep-
tive agents, i.e. passive recipients of stimuli
manifested through intuitive representations
(→ inner/outer sense), on the one hand, and
spontaneous discursive agents (→ spontane-
ity), i.e. active agents employing conceptual
representations, on the other. Kant does
conduct an investigation into the powers of
the thinking subject, and to that extent he is
interested in psychology as he has defined it,
although his inquiries are of a nature such
that they are crucially distinct from the other
forms of psychological inquiry that he recog-
nizes, i.e. rational psychology and empirical
psychology.
For Kant, transcendental inquiry into the
nature of the thinking subject requires care-
ful delineation of the difference between
such an inquiry and the inquiries pursued
by empirical and rational psychologists.
Kant describes empirical psychology as the
attempt to cognize the human soul from our
experience, and rational psychology as the
attempt to characterize the human soul from
concepts alone (cf. LM 263).
The latter inquiry, which Kant comes to
reject as part of his rejection of the Leibnizian-
Wolffian paradigm of rationalist → meta-
physics, seeks to establish key features of the
human soul  – its immateriality, simplicity,
identity and immortality – through syllogis-
tic inference from the initial premise of the
very concept of a thinking self (A345=B403)
(→ Paralogisms).
252
Spontaneous concept-use can be under-
stood as the capacity to employ concepts in
manners not simply determined as patterned
reactions to received stimuli. In this sense, the
subject matter of transcendental psychology
is distinct from that of empirical psychology,
which concerns the psychological mecha-
nisms of association and habit insofar as they
govern the practice of → judgment.
Lockean psychology, for example, affords
the human mind the process of association as
a central cognitive capacity in the formation
of judgments about empirical objects. The
capacity for association is expressed by Kant
as the capacity for reproduction in the →
imagination. The capacity for associating dif-
ferent representations under a particular rule
presupposes the capacity to first render those
representations as associable, as manifesting
a basic affinity such that their connection via
association can take place (A100–102). Kant’s
transcendental psychology thus concerns the
conditions under which the observable proc-
esses of empirical psychology can take place.
In investigating the nature of the thinking
subject, Kant focuses upon the ‘I’ that can act
as the subject of all empirical judgments. As
such, the ‘I’ is not determined by the particu-
lar content of any individual empirical judg-
ment but is rather that which accompanies
all such judgments and which, Kant argues,
makes such judgments first possible. In this
way, the psychological investigation of the
thinking ‘I’ is also a transcendental investiga-
tion (A343=B401).
Another difference between empirical and
transcendental psychology concerns the fact
that the subject matter of empirical psychol-
ogy is the observable empirical self (P 337).
The empirical self is one conditioned in time,
and the act of self-observation is similarly a
temporally conditioned act. The process of
self-examination itself, Kant claims, has the

tendency to alter the object of one’s examina-
tion, such that one cannot grasp unalterable
truths regarding one’s own self through tem-
poral acts of introspective observation (MFNS
471). Transcendental psychology, on the other
hand, proceeds via argumentation to uncover
the features of the transcendental self that must
be operative in order for self-consciousness (→
apperception) per se to be possible.
Finally, Kant claims that the type of cogni-
tion with which he is concerned, namely → a
priori cognition, cannot be examined through
the methodology of empirical psychology. A
priori cognition involves apodictic certainty,
i.e. → necessity (B4), whereas empirical psy-
chology can only concern itself with facts
regarding what is or has been the case, and
not what must be the case (A86–87=B119).
To uncover the sources of a priori cognition,
a different kind of inquiry into our cognitive
powers must be pursued. Kant holds this to
be true of all a priori judgments, including
aesthetic ones (CJ 266).
Despite Kant’s own achievements with
regard to the transcendental conditions of the
thinking subject, he ultimately rejects the pos-
sibility that empirical psychology could ever
achieve the status of a science, properly so
called (MFNS 471). Apart from the fact that
its methodology precludes it from achieving
a priori cognition, Kant also holds that since
empirical psychology is ultimately concerned
with the self as inner appearance, it is not ame-
nable to mathematical quantification of its
solely temporal dimension, which is for Kant
a necessary feature of genuine science. – JC
Further Reading
G. Hatfield, ‘Empirical, rational and
transcendental psychology: psychology
as science and as philosophy’, in P. Guyer
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant
253
Key Themes and Topics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), pp. 200–227.
T. Sturm, ‘How not to investigate the human
mind: Kant on the impossibility of
empirical psychology’, in E. Watkins (ed.),
Kant and the Sciences (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001), pp. 163–184.
Pure
A cognition (or representation) is pure if
it is ‘not mixed with anything foreign to
it’ (A11); more specifically, if no sensa-
tion is intermixed with it (A11; A20=B34).
‘Pure’ is thus very close to → a priori in
meaning, and these two terms are often
used interchangeably. Purity is also closely
related to → form (in contrast to matter).
But occasionally Kant takes care to demar-
cate purity as a further specification under
the concept ‘a priori’. This makes it possi-
ble for there to be non-pure a priori judg-
ments. Such a judgment contains a concept
linked to → experience. For instance, the
a priori judgment ‘Every alteration has its
cause’ is not pure in this more restrictive
sense, since the concept of alteration ‘can
be drawn only from experience’ (B3; cf.
UTP 183–184).
An important task of Kant’s Critical
project is to isolate pure uses of faculties,
as well as pure types of → judgment and
→ representation in the different areas of
philosophy. As regards sensibility, its pure
forms are found by abstraction of all mat-
ter (i.e. sensation) from → intuition. In this
way, pure intuition is uncovered, and with it
the pure forms of sensibility (space and time)
(cf. A20–21=B34–35) (→ Transcendental
Aesthetic). A corresponding investigation of
the understanding as to its form leads to the
Key Themes and Topics
discovery of its pure concepts (the categories)
(→ deduction, judgment). The pure concepts
presuppose pure → apperception, whose
synthetic unity is ‘the highest point’ of the
understanding (B132–134). → Reason too
has its pure concepts, namely the transcen-
dental → ideas (A321=B378).
In Kant’s moral philosophy, a main task
is to show that pure reason can be practi-
cal, i.e. capable of determining the → will
against all empirical inclinations (CPrR 15)
(→ morality). Pure practical reason is gov-
erned by the pure moral law (→ categorical
imperative), which is binding for all rational
beings.
Also in Kant’s aesthetics purity plays a
crucial role. Beauty is expressed in a pure
→ aesthetic judgment (pure judgment of
taste). As independent of any conceptual
determination of the object, and not influ-
enced by feelings of agreeableness, this is
grounded only on the ‘purposiveness of the
form’ (CJ 223).
Apart from establishing pure principles
and cognitions, Kant’s Critical philosophy
also examines unwarranted claims of purity,
as is manifest from the title of CPR. The
critique of pure theoretical reason surveys
reason’s attempts to surpass the limits of
cognition and diagnoses the transcendental
illusion causing these attempts (→ Dialectic).
‘Pure reason’, as the target of → critique,
denotes the transcendent metaphysics exem-
plified by rationalism (→ Wolff). – MQ
Pure intuition → INTUITION
Purposiveness → teleology
Quid juris → deduction
254
Radical evil
The term ‘radical evil’ first appears in Kant’s
article ‘On the Radical Evil in Human
Nature’ (Berlinische Monatsschrift, April
1792, pp. 323–385), which one year later is
published as the first part of R (1793/1794).
It has been the subject of debate ever since
whether or not Kant’s notion of radical evil
implies a rupture with respect to, especially,
his practical philosophy or Critical ethics
developed during the 1780s.
Some critics also suggest that Kant’s
notion of radical evil is not radical enough
to account for ‘absolute evil’ (in particular in
view of the excessive atrocities of the twen-
tieth century), especially since Kant seems to
rule out the possibility of what he calls dia-
bolic evil (cf. esp. R 35, 37). However, before
endorsing or challenging such criticisms, the
specific radicality of Kant’s notion of radical
evil should be acknowledged, in particular
against the background of his moral philoso-
phy (→ morality).
The first thing to emphasize, then, is that
radical evil concerns a natural propensity in
human nature, as conceptually opposed to
human nature’s original predisposition to
the good. Kant defines a propensity as ‘the
subjective ground of the possibility of an
inclination [. . .], insofar as this possibility
is contingent for humanity in general’. He
writes further: ‘It is distinguished from a pre-
disposition in that a propensity can indeed
be innate yet may be represented as not being
such: it can rather be thought of [. . .] (if evil)
as brought by the human being upon him-
self.’ (R 29)
This concept of propensity is explicated by
using a legal and deontological terminology,
because Kant is interested in

a propensity to genuine evil, i.e., moral
evil, which, since it is only possible as the
determination of a free power of choice
and this power for its part can be judged
good or evil only on the basis of its max-
ims, must reside in the subjective ground
for the possibility of the deviation of the
maxims from the moral law. And, if it is
legitimate to assume that this propensity
belongs to the human being universally
[. . .], the propensity will be called a
­natural propensity of the human being to
evil. (R 29)
The radicality of the Kantian conception lies
in the fact that it not only concerns a gen-
eral weakness or a shortcoming of human
nature, nor merely an impurity of the human
heart, refusing to adopt the moral law (→
­categorical imperative) alone as its sufficient
incentive, but ‘the perversity (perversitas) of
the human heart, for it reverses the ethical
order as regards the incentives of a free power
of choice’ – a perversity or reversal by which
‘the mode of thinking [Denkungsart] is [. . .]
corrupted at its root (so far as the moral
disposition [Gesinnung] is concerned) [. . .]’
(R 30; translation amended).
It is this morally evil propensity that
deserves the predicate radical insofar as ‘it
corrupts the ground of all maxims; as natu-
ral propensity, it is also not to be extirpated
through human forces, for this could only
happen through good maxims [. . .]’ (R 37).
Simultaneously, Kant maintains that ‘it must
equally be possible to overcome [überwie-
gen] this evil, for it is found in the human
being as acting freely’ (R 37). This is why
he forcefully argues that the ground of evil
should not be situated in the sensible nature
(Sinnlichkeit) of the human being, but nei-
ther in a corruption (Verderbnis) of morally
legislative reason itself.
255
Key Themes and Topics
But, if a human being is corrupt in the very
ground of his maxims, how is a restoration
(Wiederherstellung) of the original predispo-
sition to the good at all possible? The only
way to reconcile propensity and predisposi-
tion is ‘by saying that a revolution is neces-
sary in the mode of thinking [Denkungsart]
but a gradual reform in the mode of sense
[Sinnesart] [. . .] and [that both] must there-
fore be possible [. . .] to the human being’
(R 47–48).
Insofar as we are able to reverse the supreme
ground of our maxims by which we were evil
human beings, we are in principle receptive to
the good, but are not yet good human beings:
I can only hope, through hard labour, to find
myself upon the path of constant progress from
bad to better – without acquiring any insight
into ‘the depths of [my] own heart (the subjec-
tive first ground of [my] maxims)’ since it is
‘inscrutable [­unerforschlich]’ to me (R 51).
According to Kant, the thesis of an innate,
radical evil means essentially this: ‘We can-
not start out in the ethical training of our
connatural moral disposition to the good
with an innocence which is natural to us but
must rather begin from the presupposition of
a depravity of our power of choice in adopt-
ing maxims contrary to the original ethical
predisposition; and, since the propensity to
this [depravity] is inextirpable, with unremit-
ting counteraction against it.’ (R 51)
In all this, it is important to keep in mind
that, for Kant, the battle against evil is not so
much a problem of (or within) the individual,
but from the outset an issue with social and
political dimensions and implications. – JV
Further Reading
S. Anderson-Gold, P. Muchnik (eds), Kant’s
Anatomy of Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009).
Key Themes and Topics
M. Forschner, ‘Über die verschiedenen
Bedeutungen des “Hangs zum Bösen”’,
in O. Höffe (ed.), Immanuel Kant. Die
Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der
bloßen Vernunft, in the series Klassiker
Auslegen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
2011), pp. 71–90.
P. Rossi, The Social Authority of Reason.
Kant’s Critique, Radical Evil, and the
Destiny of Humankind (Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 2005), ch. 4.
Rational faith → religion
Reality (objective reality)
Reality is the equivalent of the German
Realität, whereas Kant’s term Wirklichkeit
is usually translated as ‘actuality’. Actuality
means ‘[t]hat which is connected with the
material conditions of experience’ (B266).
Everything is actual which ‘stands in one
context with a perception in accordance
with the laws of the empirical progres-
sion’ (A493=B521). Actuality does not refer
to things in themselves but to the objects
of perception, which exist ‘only in experi-
ence, and [. . .] do not exist at all outside it’
(A492–493=B521).
Actuality is to be identified with the modal
category of ‘existence’ (Dasein) (A80=B106),
whereas ‘reality’ is one of the categories of
quality (→ Anticipations of Perception). So
when Kant speaks of the reality of things he
does not, or not in the first instance, mean
the reality, or more precisely, the actuality of
the objects of → experience. Reality, as cate-
gory, is attributed to the things judged about
in terms of the objective determination of the
manifold of sensations that are involved in
any particular empirical → judgment. On the
256
other hand, however, reality must be seen as
more than determinate objects of experience,
that is, the appearances in experience.
That is to say, Kant makes a distinction
between the reality of phenomena, i.e. the
objects of experience, and the realitates nou-
mena, which are putative ‘example[s] of [. . .]
pure and non-sensible reality’ (B338n.). Kant
refers to reality as realitas phenomenon and
as realitas noumenon in the → Amphiboly
section, where the former relates to ‘realities
in → appearance’ and the latter to reality as
‘represented only through the pure under-
standing’ (B320). In a Reflexion, Kant links
this to another distinction, namely between
‘absolute’ and ‘comparative’ reality (Refl
5826), whereby absolute reality concerns
what ‘in respect of a thing in general belongs
to Being’. In Refl 4182, Kant makes clear
that reality is either comparative or absolute
and that realitas phenomenon is not abso-
lute. The latter does not immediately refer to
the thing in itself but is only that to which the
category of reality is attributed, which is in
fact ‘the synthesis in an empirical conscious-
ness in general’ (A175=B217). The reality
meant here corresponds to sensation (B207).
However, in the Schematism chapter Kant
asserts that that which corresponds to sen-
sation is ‘the transcendental matter of all
objects, as things in themselves (thinghood,
reality)’ (B182=A143). The term ‘thinghood’
is the English translation of the German
Sachheit, which Kant equates with ‘reality’
(B602) in the transcendental sense, i.e. real-
ity regarded as ‘transcendental matter’ or
the noumenal thing in itself rather than as
the sensible matter of perception. Only the
former is reality in the absolute sense.
By ‘objective reality’, Kant understands
the relation of cognition to an → object
(A155–156=B194–195), which amounts to
an object being ‘given in some way’, which ‘is

nothing other than to relate its representation
to experience (whether this be actual or still
possible)’ (ibid.). In other words, ‘[t]he pos-
sibility of experience is therefore that which
gives all of our cognitions a priori objective
reality’ (ibid.). It is in fact the synthetic unity
of concepts in synthetic a priori propositions
that establishes objective reality by provid-
ing them a ‘third thing, namely a pure object’
(B196=A157). Similarly, at A109 Kant argues
that ‘[t]he pure concept of this transcendental
object [. . .] is that which in all of our empiri-
cal concepts in general can provide relation
to an object, i.e., objective reality’.
These distinctions are related to Kant’s dis-
crimination between empirical realism and
transcendental realism, the former of which
he associates with his own → transcenden-
tal idealism. Empirically real is that which is
conditioned by the → pure forms of human
cognition, which leads Kant to claim that
space and time are not transcendentally real
(B52–53), but only objectively or empirically
real, which comports with their transcenden-
tal ideality. – DS
Reason
In → Baumgarten’s Metaphysica, which Kant
used as a course textbook, ‘ratio’, which is
translated as ‘ground’ (Pars I, ontologia §14),
is the principle of connectedness of all things.
Knowledge of these grounds is ontology
or, as Baumgarten indicates, ‘architectonic’
(ibid., §4), which consists of principles of
cognition as well as of objects of knowledge.
Kant adopts from his predecessors the idea
of an architectonic order of rational knowl-
edge but radically revises it, giving up on the
ambition to build ‘a tower that would reach
the heavens’, and offering his readers instead
257
Key Themes and Topics
a modest dwelling ‘just roomy enough for
our business on the plane of experience’
(A707=B735).
The task of surveying reason’s cognitive
claims takes shape both in his major philo-
sophical works and in his contributions to
contemporary debates through his ‘popu-
lar’ essays. A common thread throughout
is the notion of → critique, that is, the self-
examination of reason in order to ascertain
which of its claims are ‘rightful’, viz. valid
and rightfully presented for our assent, and
which are ‘groundless pretensions’ (Axi) and
must be rejected.
In CPR, Kant calls upon reason to under-
take ‘the most difficult of all its tasks, namely
that of self-knowledge’ (Axi). That reason is
capable of self-knowledge is central to Kant’s
conception of both philosophical and popu-
lar uses of reason. In the domain of → meta-
physics, or of ‘pure reason’, Kant’s stance is
shaped by his analysis of the failure of clas-
sical rationalism to establish that a priori
reflection yields substantive truths and that
it is a reliable procedure of philosophical
justification.
Self-knowledge results in the repudiation
of certain claims to metaphysical knowledge,
a topic analyzed in the Transcendental →
Dialectic of CPR. The negative conclusion of
the Transcendental Dialectic is that reason
affords us no insights of its own. At the same
time, Kant is keen to establish that reason is
not ‘inactive’, as → Hume claimed, but capa-
ble of self-reflection, self-criticism and, cru-
cially, of offering us guidance in the practical
sphere.
Accordingly, the positive conclusion that
can be drawn from the Transcendental
Dialectic is that reason is capable of setting
its own boundaries. The limits of rational
reflection are not something we discover, as
a brute fact of our human constitution, but
Key Themes and Topics
rather something which can be accounted
for rationally. Reason, as Kant puts it, is ‘not
like a pupil’ who indiscriminately copies his
teacher’s words, but rather like ‘an appointed
judge who compels witnesses to answer the
questions he puts to them’ (Bxiii).
Reason’s role in the practical sphere is
similarly one of critical scrutiny. In sharp
contrast to moral sceptics and naturalists,
Kant affirms reason’s right to guide our
actions. Reason is end-setting in the sense
that it enables agents to subject to rational
scrutiny the ends they set out to pursue, not
just the means they may use to pursue them.
Consistently with the conclusions of CPR,
Kant does not present reason as equipping us
with a vision of the good, but rather, with a
way of testing our maxims. The law of pure
practical reason stipulates that ‘the maxim of
your will could always hold at the same time
as a principle in a giving of universal law’
(CPrR 30).
Although Kant acknowledges that his
theoretical and, in large part, also his moral
writings are technical, and that ‘the public
need take no interest’ in such ‘subtle investi-
gations’ (CPrR 163), his aim in setting human
reason on a critical path is to secure it from
dogmatism and from scepticism. Kant iden-
tifies dogmatism with classical rationalism
and scepticism with Hume (cf. A856). There
are parallels in the general employment of
reason.
The dogmatist resembles the popular gen-
ius, who ‘pleased with its bold flights’ mes-
merizes his audience into ‘enthusiasm’ (OT
145) (→ enthusiasm). The sceptical equiva-
lent is loss of all regard for the bonds of
reason and degeneration ‘into a misuse and
a presumptuous trust in the independence of
its faculties from all limitations’ (OT 146).
To avoid such pitfalls, lawful yet critical
thinking is of the essence.
258
In works such as OT or E, Kant formu-
lates in non-technical terms what it is for our
ordinary reasoning to be subject to critical
scrutiny. As in CPR, at issue is the preserva-
tion of reason’s authority. When we say of a
course of action or a belief that it is rational
in everyday life we mean something like ‘it
makes sense’, that we endorse it in some way
and think it worthwhile. In Kant’s words,
reason and rational argument are held in
high esteem among ‘the common people’
(A749; trans. Kemp Smith).
The question then is: to what does rea-
son owe its prestige? In the domain of pure
reason, Kant shows that dogmatic faith in
reason can lead to irrationality, to contradic-
tions and → paralogisms. It is only through
the process of critique that reason is able to
uphold its authority.
Critical scrutiny is not just the preserve of
the philosophical architect, however, it is vital
also for the everyday use of reason. Kant’s
conception of a public use of reason, the free-
dom to engage in critical discussion in public,
is the practical upshot of this basic commit-
ment. As Kant argues, ‘[r]eason must subject
itself to critique in all its undertakings, and
cannot restrict the freedom of critique through
any prohibition without damaging itself [. . .]’
(A738). Freedom is however not anarchy. The
enemy of reason is not just ‘civil compulsion’
and fear of ‘one’s own investigation’, but also
‘lawlessness in thinking’ (OT 144–145).
While Kant does not lay down any laws
for the general employment of reason, he
formulates a basic test for critical reasoning:
whenever we are urged to accept something,
we must ask ourselves whether it is possible
to transform either the reason for accept-
ing it or the rule that follows from what is
accepted into ‘a universal principle for the
use of [one’s own] reason’ (OT 146n.). It is
through such effort, Kant believes, that we

may, as a species, shape our character, bring
to fruition our rational abilities and become
a ‘rational animal’ (Anthr 321). – KD
Further Reading
S. Engstrom, The Form of Practical
Knowledge: A Study of the Categorical
Imperative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2009).
S. Gardner, ‘The primacy of practical
reason’, in G. Bird (ed.), A Companion
to Kant (Malden, MA/Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010), pp. 259–274.
O. O’Neill, ‘Vindicating reason’, in P. Guyer
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), pp. 280–308.
S. Neiman, The Unity of Reason: Rereading
Kant (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994).
Receptivity → spontaneity
Reflection → logic
Reflection, concepts of →
Amphiboly
Reflective judgment →
aesthetic judgment, judgment
Refutation of Idealism
Kant’s Refutation of Idealism, which is found
in the B-version of CPR (B274–279), is explic-
itly concerned with distancing the → transcen-
dental idealism of CPR from what he calls the
‘problematic idealism’ (B274) of → Descartes,
and the ‘dogmatic idealism’ of Berkeley (B274).
It is clearly the case that Kant also intends the
259
Key Themes and Topics
Refutation to oppose all forms of transcenden-
tal realism, which is the view that the mind can
know objects as they are in themselves – that
is, either by directly intuiting their essence in
some sense, or by claiming knowledge of real
objects existing independently of the mind (see
A369) (→ thing in itself).
Not only is Kant concerned, in the
Refutation, with defeating a brand of exter-
nal world scepticism associated with the
rationalism of Descartes, but it is clear that
he is also challenging a brand of empirical
scepticism that one finds in the philosophy
of → Hume (see Hume, Treatise of Human
Nature, Bk 1, pt. IV, §II, ‘Of scepticism with
regard to the senses’). In the B-preface, in a
note (Bxxxix n.) that is intended to supple-
ment the argument of the Refutation, Kant
claims that it is a ‘scandal of philosophy’ that
a proof for the existence of external objects
has as yet not been forthcoming. So in essence,
the Refutation is important for Kant as a
positive argument in itself, but, importantly,
it is also designed to distance the theory of
knowledge put forward in CPR from those
systems of thought mentioned above.
It is important to mention that Kant
inserts the Refutation in the → Postulates of
Empirical Thought section of the B-edition
of CPR. This placement is significant due
to the fact that the Postulates are inextrica-
bly bound up with the modal categories of
experience in general. The modal categories
of possibility, actuality and → necessity are
employed in order to ‘express only the rela-
tion [of the concept] to the faculty of cogni-
tion’ (A219=B266). Given that the Refutation
appears at the end of the Second Postulate,
which deals with ‘cognizing the actuality of
things’ (B272=A225), we can clearly see that
one of its main concerns is to emphasize the
centrality of the a priori conditions required
for our knowledge of things.
Key Themes and Topics
The main content of the Refutation argu-
ment can be found in one condensed paragraph
at B275–276, along with an important accom-
panying passage contained in the B-Preface
(Bxli). The Theorem basically tells the reader
exactly what the argument hopes to achieve
overall, which is that if I am conscious of my
own existence, as empirically determined, then
this proves that I am also aware of objects
existing outside of my mind in space.
The Proof starts with the basic claim that
what I am most immediately aware of is my
own conscious existence: ‘I am conscious of
my existence as determined in time.’ (B275)
What Kant is aiming to do at this point is
to seemingly offer a tacit agreement with
the sceptic’s claim that it is almost beyond
reproach that I am conscious of my ideas,
which appear in successive moments in time.
It follows from this that the sceptic main-
tains that I can never actually be certain of
the existence of objects external to the mind.
Kant then argues, in the second premise of
the Proof, that if I accept the first premise
(which appeases the sceptic), then one can
only accept it if a condition can be found for
the changing states of mind which I undergo.
It is at this point that a remarkable turna-
round in the argument ensues, because Kant
at once demands that the immediacy of our
inner consciousness is only possible if ‘some-
thing persistent in perception’ (B275) can be
found. In many ways, this is the point in the
argument where Kant’s claim that ‘the game
that idealism plays has [. . .] been turned
against it’ (B276) is most significant. In other
words, in order for the empirical idealist to
claim that what is immediately known are
our own inner representations, something
must be perceived outside of us, i.e. in an
‘outer sense’ (→ inner/outer sense).
Building on the above, Kant continues his
argument by insisting that the permanent
260
something is made possible through a ‘thing’
outside me (B275) and then by ‘actual things’
(ibid.) perceived outside me. The perception
of these ‘actual things’ leads to a key point
in the argument, in the penultimate sentence
of the paragraph, when Kant claims that my
‘consciousness [of my existence] in time’
(B276) is inextricably bound up with ‘the
existence of the things outside me’ (ibid.),
which condition such time-consciousness.
These ‘things’ stand in as perceptual surro-
gates for the unchanging permanent struc-
ture, which are perceived in space – the realm
of outer sense. Kant can now say that my own
consciousness in time is ‘at the same time an
immediate consciousness of the existence of
other things outside me’ (ibid.).
An intriguing aspect of the Refutation is
how Kant separates the role of the → imagi-
nation from our intuition of space. Claiming
that the faculty of → intuition would be
‘annihilate[d]’ (B277n.) should there be no
outer sense, Kant argues that without an a
priori grasp of something given through pure
receptivity there would be no imagination.
It is clear, however, that in order even
only to imagine something as outer, that is,
to present it to sensibility in intuition, we
must already have an outer sense, and must
thereby immediately distinguish the mere
receptivity of an outer intuition from the →
spontaneity which characterizes every act of
imagination (B277). – NH
Further Reading
D. Emundts, ‘The Refutation of Idealism
and the distinction between phenomena
and noumena’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Kant’s
‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010),
pp. 168–189, pt. I.

P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987), pt. IV.
S. Stapleford, Kant’s Transcendental
Arguments: Disciplining Pure Reason
(London/New York: Continuum, 2008),
ch. 3.
Regulative principles
The importance of Kant’s distinction between
constitutive and regulative principles, which
respectively relate to the constitution of expe-
riential cognition (→ knowledge) and to the
mere regulation thereof, can hardly be under-
estimated since it touches upon the basic
structure of his Critical philosophy. In fact,
no extensive comment seems to be needed
to show that whereas constitutive principles
apply legitimately only to the understand-
ing, regulative principles apply to pure →
reason itself and, therefore, are exemplarily
discussed in the → Dialectic, the second part
of the Logic in CPR.
According to Kant’s definition, a regulative
principle of reason is a rule (Latin: regula)
prescribing a regress in the series of condi-
tions of possibility for (spatiotemporally)
given appearances. That is to say, it concerns
not the possibility of (experiential) cognition
of objects, as with the constitutive principles
of the understanding, but at the same time it
does not go fully beyond all possible experi-
ence either, as would be the case with a (the-
oretically unjustifiable) constitutive principle
of reason. It is then merely a principle that
regulates or postulates ‘the greatest possible
continuation and extension of possible expe-
rience’, as Kant writes (B537), in terms of a
legitimate and consistent account of the sub-
jectively necessary elements of thinking, such
261
Key Themes and Topics
as heuristic ones, that are transcendentally
presupposed (see B544).
For one thing, Kant argues that philo-
sophical concepts like → necessity and con-
tingency are not objectively valid since they
do not pertain to or concern things (i.e.
appearances) themselves. They can however
be justified as subjective principles of reason,
because these concepts or principles encour-
age and impel us to keep on searching for
further (necessary) grounds of what is con-
tingently given, and thus remind us never to
assume anything empirical as an uncondi-
tioned endpoint of our analysis (cf. B644).
Interestingly, Kant also appeals to his
notorious ‘as if’-argument to explicate the
regulative character of the summum ens by
stating that ‘[t]he ideal of the highest being
is [. . .] nothing other than a regulative
principle of reason’, and that one should
‘regard all combination in the world as
if it arose from an all-sufficient necessary
cause, so as to ground on that cause the
rule of a unity that is systematic and neces-
sary according to universal laws’ (B647).
Clearly, for Kant such a statement implies
no assertion of anything existing that is
objectively necessary, but precisely denotes
a mere formal regulative principle, although
he warns that it is unavoidable, by means
of what is called a ‘transcendental subrep-
tion’, ‘to represent this formal principle to
oneself as constitutive, and to think of this
[systematic] unity hypostatically’ (B647).
Thus, it is absolutely crucial to keep in
mind that regulative principles involve the
constant danger of transcendental illusion
(→ Dialectic), that is, of mistaking them
for constitutive ones by forgetting their
objective indeterminacy.
Another example mentioned by Kant
could be illuminating from a historical
viewpoint, namely that of what he calls
Key Themes and Topics
‘the widely respected law of the ladder of
continuity among creatures, made current
by Leibniz and excellently supported by
Bonnet’ (B696). Even though the observa-
tion and study of the order of nature could
never present this law or principle, i.e. ‘the
principle of affinity’, as something that can
be asserted to be objectively true, he argues
that the method for the investigation of the
order of nature in conformity with such a
principle is ‘a legitimate and excellent regu-
lative principle of reason’, which ‘without
determining anything, [. . .] only points the
way toward systematic unity’ (B696) (→
system).
Finally, one must point to a distinction
that Kant makes – and, in his view, has great
importance for transcendental philosophy –
between two ways of thinking regarding
one and the same presupposition, namely
that there can be a ‘satisfactory reason for
assuming something relatively (suppositio
relativa), without being warranted in assum-
ing it absolutely (suppositio absoluta)’. This
distinction seems particularly relevant since
the first type of presupposition applies in
the case of a regulative principle, ‘for which
we assume a supreme ground merely with
the intention of thinking the universality
of the principle all the more determinately
[um desto bestimmter die Allgemeinheit des
Princips zu denken]’ (B704). Regulative prin-
ciples do therefore not imply any absolute
assumption regarding the real, or objective,
existence of such a supreme or underly-
ing ground, which has only the status of a
transcendental → idea or → transcendental
ideal.
The fact that numerous text passages may
be cited to illustrate Kant’s concept of regula-
tion already shows the general consistency of
his views on the need for and status of regu-
lative principles. – JV
262
Further Reading
M. Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental
Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), ch. 8.
R.-P. Horstmann, ‘Der Anhang zur
transzendentalen Dialektik (A642/
B670–A704/B732). Die Idee der
systematischen Einheit’, in G. Mohr, M.
Willaschek (eds), Immanuel Kant. Kritik
der reinen Vernunft, in the series Klassiker
Auslegen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998),
pp. 525–545.
F. Rauscher, ‘The appendix to the Dialectic
and the Canon of Reason: The positive
role of reason’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), pp. 290–309.
Religion (highest good)
In R, Kant’s philosophical conception, and
analysis of, the phenomenon of religion
depends heavily on a fundamental distinction,
as well as a rather strict hierarchy, between two
concepts of religion and religious community.
On the one hand, there is the essen-
tially moral and universal concept of pure
‘rational religion’ or ‘religion of reason’
(Vernunftreligion), also called pure ‘rational
faith’ (Vernunftglaube) or pure ‘religious
faith’ (Religionsglaube), or ‘natural religion’
(natürliche Religion), or even simply the ‘one
(true) religion’ (R 107). This concept cor-
responds to the idea of an ethical common-
wealth or community according to the laws
of → virtue (nach Tugendgesetzen), which in
human history can never be fully attained –
due to the → radical evil in human nature –
but only gradually approximated, as well as
to a universal, purely invisible church, or a

kingdom of God, beyond civil society or legal
institutions, which would ultimately satisfy
the unity and universality claims of religion.
On the other hand, there is the essen-
tially historical and statutory concept of
‘ecclesiastical faith’ (Kirchenglaube), also
called ‘historical faith’ or ‘statutory reli-
gion’, ‘statutory faith’ or ‘revealed faith’
(Offenbarungsglauben), or indeed ‘revealed
religion’ (geoffenbarte Religion). This con-
cept corresponds to the different organized
churches or various religious denominations,
including all their particular beliefs and rites,
that exist or have existed (or, for that mat-
ter, might exist) positively and visibly in the
course of human history.
Famously, in the preface to the second edi-
tion (1794) of R, Kant uses the image of con-
centric circles to indicate the relation between
his two concepts of religion or faith:
Since [. . .] revelation can at least com-
prise also the pure religion of reason,
whereas, conversely, the latter cannot do
the same for what is historical in revela-
tion, I shall be able to consider the first as
a wider sphere of faith that includes the
other, a narrower one, within itself (not
as two circles external to one another but
as concentric circles); the philosopher, as
purely a teacher of reason (from mere
principles a priori), must keep within the
inner circle and, thereby, also abstract
from all experience. (R 12)
This picture of two concentric circles, the
inner circle of pure rational religion and the
wider circle of historical revelation, already
reveals the philosophical primacy and prior-
ity of pure rational religion. Since, in Kant’s
view, pure rational religion represents the
true inner kernel or final destination of any
(possible) historical religion, all historical
elements, particular beliefs or religious rites
263
Key Themes and Topics
and cults in the wider sphere should be criti-
cally evaluated by the moral and universal
standards of the inner one. Moreover, they
should ultimately be used for instrumental
or provisional reasons only, as a means (or
‘vehicle’) to an end, namely in order to grad-
ually approximate these a priori standards.
It is important to note that Kant starts
his discussion of religion against the back-
ground of his Critical practical philosophy
(→ morality), in particular his doctrine of
the moral law (→ categorical imperative).
Recall, for instance, two famous statements
in the preface to the first edition (1793) of
R regarding, on the one hand, the founda-
tional role of morality and, on the other, the
supplementary or functional role of religion,
namely for the sake of (the possibility of)
morality’s efficacy in the world.
First, Kant states that ‘morality really has
no need of an end for right conduct’ since the
moral law ‘that contains the formal condition
of the use of freedom in general suffices to it’.
Nevertheless, ‘it cannot possibly be a matter
of indifference to reason how to answer the
question, What is then the result of this right
conduct of ours?’ (R 4–5).
Secondly, Kant adds that reason’s own
interest in the efficacy of the moral law in
the world entails ‘the idea of an object that
unites within itself the formal condition of all
such ends as we ought to have (→ duty) with
everything which is conditional upon ends
we have and which conforms to duty (happi-
ness proportioned to its observance)’. What
Kant means here is the notion ‘of a highest
good in the world’, the possibility of which
presupposes ‘a higher, moral, most holy, and
omnipotent being’ (R 5), who alone is able to
unite duty and happiness.
What appears to be crucial to Kant’s
approach, however, is to acknowledge
the appropriate order between duty and
Key Themes and Topics
happiness, between moral foundation and
moral end, namely that the idea of a highest
good ‘rises out of morality and is not its foun-
dation; that it is an end which to make one’s
own already presupposes ethical principles’
(R 5). One could of course argue whether,
or to what extent, Kant remains completely
faithful to these programmatic statements on
the relation between morality and religion,
between duty and happiness, and on the
idea of a highest good in the world and the
need of assuming ‘a higher, moral, most holy
omnipotent being’.
However, there are no profound reasons to
doubt the global consistency and coherence
of Kant’s philosophy of religion, as well as
the validity of its major concerns. In essence,
it is a theory of morally and rationally war-
ranted hope. Kant writes:
Reason says that whoever does, in a dis-
position of true devotion to duty, as much
lies within his power to satisfy his obli-
gation (at least in a steady approxima-
tion toward complete conformity to the
law), can legitimately hope that what lies
outside his power will be supplemented
by the supreme wisdom in some way or
other (which can render permanent the
disposition to this steady approxima-
tion). (R 171)
The implications of Kant’s theory become
particularly evident when looking at his
views on specific religious issues. Priestcraft
(Pfaffentum), for instance, is unmasked by
Kant as ‘a regime in the counterfeit service
[Afterdienst] of the good principle’ (R 175)
since it is supposed to involve ‘the constitu-
tion of a church to the extent that a fetish-
service [Fetischdienst] is the rule; and this
always obtains wherever statutory com-
mands, rules of faith and observances, rather
264
than principles of morality, make up the
groundwork and the essence of the church’
(R 179).
And similar arguments are presented
against religious worship and religious
cult, as being forms of obtaining favour
(Gunstbewerbung) that obstruct and pervert
the moral principle that ‘[a]part from a good
life-conduct, anything which the human
being supposes that he can do to become
well-pleasing to God is mere religious delu-
sion and counterfeit service of God’ (R
170–171). – JV
Further Reading
J. DiCenso, Kant, Religion, and Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011).
J. DiCenso, Religion within the Boundaries of
Mere Reason. A Commentary (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012).
J. E. Hare, The Moral Gap. Kantian Ethics,
Human Limits and God’s Assistance
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pt. I.
O. Höffe (ed.), Immanuel Kant. Die Religion
innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen
Vernunft, in the series Klassiker Auslegen
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011).
M. Kuehn, ‘Moral faith and the highest
good’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Kant and Modern
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), pp. 588–629.
L. Pasternack, Kant on Religion within the
Boundaries of Mere Reason (London,
New York: Routledge, 2013).
A. Wood, ‘Religion, ethical community, and
the struggle against evil’, in C. Payne,
L. Thorpe (eds), Kant and the Concept of
Community (Rochester, NY: University of
Rochester Press, 2011), pp. 121–137.

Representation
‘Representation’ is the English translation
of the Latin repraesentatio, which in Kant’s
German is rendered Vorstellung. In OPD
Kant writes that ‘the word “representation”
is understood with sufficient precision and
employed with confidence, even though its
meaning can never be analyzed by means of
definition’ (OPD 70) and in JL he states that
representation ‘cannot be explained at all’
(JL 34).
Despite this, the concept of ‘representa-
tion’ is crucial for understanding Kant’s
thought. In fact, in general ‘representation’
for Kant is a genus that characterizes the fac-
ulty of cognition, as it is used in the Wolffian
School, especially in → Baumgarten and →
Meier, since cognition always presupposes
representation. In a famous letter of 21
February 1772 to → Herz, Kant announces
that a central concern of his philosophy will
be the investigation into answering the ques-
tion ‘What is the ground of the relation of
that in us which we call “representation” to
the object?’ (Corr-I 130) (→ object).
In CPR, representations in general are said
to be ‘inner determinations of our mind in
this or that temporal relation’ (B242=A197).
In the section ‘On the ideas in general’ of
the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant seems to
suggest, in the so-called Stufenleiter (B376–
377=A320), that ‘representation’ is indeed
the central concept of his transcendental phi-
losophy, which puts us on the way to answer-
ing the above-mentioned question.
From the progression of the Stufenleiter it
can be inferred that not every representation
is eo ipso a conscious representation, i.e. a
perception, and that there are thus also uncon-
scious representations (cf. Corr-II 52). But
most importantly, it is clear from the progres-
sion passage that only if the representation
265
Key Themes and Topics
refers not just to an inner determination of
the mind but also to a mind–external object,
then it yields a cognition, i.e. a representation
that has an object.
A representation is furthermore an →
intuition when it is singular and immediately
refers to the object (repraesentatio singularis),
while it is a concept or a universal representa-
tion (repraesentatio per notas communes) or
reflected representation (repraesentatio dis-
cursiva) (JL 91), when it refers to the object
by means of the mediation of a mark.
In CPR, Kant further argues that repre-
sentations are either → pure or empirical.
Pure representations are representations in
which ‘nothing is to be encountered that
belongs to sensation’ (A20=B34). Empirical
representations contain sensation, which
presupposes the actual presence of the object
(cf. A50=B74). A representation can also be
either clear or obscure. A representation ‘is
clear if the consciousness in it is sufficient for
a consciousness of the difference between it
and others’, while it is obscure ‘if this con-
sciousness suffices for a distinction, but
not for a consciousness of the difference’
(B415n.). → Logic deals only with clear but
not with obscure representations, and it does
not show how representations arise, but
merely how they agree with logical → form
(cf. JL 33).
All clear representations can be distin-
guished in regard to distinctness and indis-
tinctness. If there is consciousness ‘of the
whole representation, but not of the mani-
fold that is contained in it, then the repre-
sentation is indistinct’ (JL 34). A distinct
representation can be either sensible, when
it ‘consists in the consciousness of the mani-
fold in intuition’, or intellectual, when it
‘rests on the analysis of the concept in regard
to the manifold that lies contained within it’
(JL 35). – MS
Key Themes and Topics
Respect → morality,
categorical imperative
Right
In Kant’s writings, the German noun Recht
and adjective recht translate into English as
‘right’ or ‘justice’ and ‘just’ respectively. Recht
means either a system of laws that govern the
external relationships between individuals –
and in this sense it comes close to what we
now call justice  – or a right, i.e. one of the
rights established by those laws. The adjec-
tive recht qualifies actions that conform to
those laws. The crucial meaning is therefore
the first one while the others depend on it.
Kant spells out the content of right (in
the first sense) in the part of MM entitled
Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine
of Right. There, he asserts that by right he
does not mean to refer to ‘what the laws in
some country at some time prescribe’ (MM
229). This is a question that the jurist must
answer. Kant is rather interested in the philo-
sophical question of ‘whether what these
laws prescribed is also right, and what the
universal criterion is by which one could
recognize right as well as wrong (iustum et
iniustum)’. The universal principle of right
says that ‘any action is right if it can coexist
with everyone’s freedom in accordance with
a universal law, or if on its maxim the free-
dom of choice of each can coexist with every-
one’s freedom in accordance with a universal
law’ (MM 229–230).
To understand why this alone constitutes
the universal principle of right one needs to
recall the conclusions Kant reached in other
areas of his philosophical system, and espe-
cially in his moral philosophy (→ morality).
There Kant argued that humans are autono-
mous beings, i.e. capable of authentic moral
agency. In autonomy lies the source of their
266
dignity, the basis of the respect due to them,
and the ground of the innate or natural right
they have, i.e. the right to → freedom, under-
stood as ‘independence from being con-
strained by another’s choice’ (MM 237).
A just system of laws has to take into
account this innate right and treat humans
accordingly. From these premises the uni-
versal principle of right follows analytically.
Each citizen is entitled to the largest sphere
of free agency possible with the sole limiting
condition that the same amount of freedom
be secured to all other citizens. Any limita-
tion of the freedom of each that does not
arise from the necessity of securing the same
amount of freedom to all others is wrong.
Any coercion exercized by the state, then, is
legitimate if and only if it is aimed at secur-
ing for all citizens the same amount of free-
dom and impeding arbitrary enlargements
of one person’s freedom at the expense of
others’.
In Kant’s opinion, the universal principle
of right is valid for any culture, tradition, or
group because it rests on → reason (a faculty
common to all humans). It is not inferred
from a sociological survey of actual juridical
systems existing around the world. Since it is
universally valid, it can be used as a test of
the justice of any existing system of laws.
In MM Kant distinguishes between pri-
vate right and public right. Private right
encompasses the rights we have in the state
of nature, while public right is ‘the sum of the
laws which need to be promulgated generally
in order to bring about a rightful condition’
(MM 311). That there are rights against oth-
ers in the state of nature – a claim in contrast
with the Hobbesian tradition  – is a direct
consequence of that moral quality (auton-
omy) that Kant, as we saw, attributes to all
humans. It is ultimately because humans are
autonomous and therefore worthy of respect

that they can legitimately claim to be entitled
(to have a right) to certain treatment by other
individuals or groups.
Kant’s account of private right begins
with an analysis of the conditions on which
things could be ‘mine or yours’. Kant thinks
that anyone can acquire and own property (a
piece of land or any other object of choice) –
a tenet in direct contrast with feudalism and
slavery. This possibility follows directly from
the pre-political, innate right to external
freedom. In the section ‘Postulate of practical
reason with regard to rights’, he argues that
if one were denied in principle the possibility
of acquiring and owning an object, then one
would be deprived of the means with which
to exercize one’s external freedom. As he puts
it: ‘[F]reedom would be depriving itself of the
use of its choice with regard to an object of
choice, by putting usable objects beyond any
possibility of being used.’ (MM 250)
In a state of nature something external
can thus be mine or yours, but, says Kant,
‘only provisionally’ (MM 256). A provision-
ally rightful possession becomes ‘conclusive’
only if the state of nature is overcome and a
civil condition is created. The moral status
of the state as well as the → duty for anyone
who lives side by side with others to enter the
civil condition rest on the fact that the state
protects rights already present in the state of
nature. They do not depend on some empiri-
cal fact about human nature, such as its pro-
pensity to violence.
Public right has three main subdivisions:
state right, the right of nations (or interna-
tional right) and cosmopolitan right (→
cosmopolitan, cosmopolitanism). State right
spells out how a state should look in order to
guarantee humans’ pre-political entitlements.
The state must (1) recognize the freedom,
equality and independence of all members,
(2) be a republic, i.e. a state characterized by
267
Key Themes and Topics
a division of powers (legislative, executive,
judiciary) and by the fact that all its citizens
could consent to the enacted laws.
The second subdivision of public right  –
the right of nations  – defines the rules that
should govern international relations. Since
nations stand to one another very much like
individuals in the state of nature, Kant argues
that they should enter a ‘universal associa-
tion of states’, where ‘rights come to hold
conclusively and a true condition of peace
[will] come about’ (MM 350).
The third and final subdivision of public
right – cosmopolitan right – concerns the rules
all nations should adopt in the treatment of
foreign individuals, especially those who visit
for the sake of commerce or cultural exchange.
Individuals hold, Kant thinks, a right ‘to visit
all regions of the earth’ (though not to stay),
while they try ‘to establish a community with
all’ (MM 353). Cosmopolitan right is one of
Kant’s most important innovations in legal
theory and is recognized as laying the foun-
dations for contemporary declarations and
treatises of human rights. – LC
Further Reading
B. S. Byrd, J. Hruschka, Kant’s Doctrine
of Right. A Commentary (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010).
O. Höffe (ed.), Immanuel Kant:
Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der
Rechtslehre, in the series Klassiker
Auslegen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999).
W. Kersting, Wohlgeordnete Freiheit.
Immanuel Kants Rechts- und
Staatsphilosophie, third edition
(Paderborn: mentis, 2007).
R. Pippin, ‘Mine and thine? The Kantian
state’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Kant and Modern
Key Themes and Topics
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), pp. 416–446.
Schematism
‘On the schematism of the pure concepts of
the understanding’ is a notoriously difficult,
but important section of CPR. The schema-
tism deals with the way in which concepts
and intuitions are related. It concerns the
subsumption of objects under concepts. The
need for special explanation arises because of
Kant’s theory of concepts (→ logic) combined
with his position that ‘[i]n all subsumptions
of an object under a concept the representa-
tions of the former must be homogeneous
with the latter [. . .]’ (A137=B176).
According to Kant, all our cognition
‘contains two very heterogeneous elements,
namely a matter for cognition from the
senses and a certain form for ordering it
[. . .]’ (A86=B118) (→ form). Intuitions and
concepts are the two distinct necessary ele-
ments of all our cognition. A concept is a
discursive → representation that ‘is always
something general, and something that
serves as a rule’ for unifying representations
(A106). Conversely, intuitions are imag-
istic representations that provide the spe-
cific particular content of our cognition (→
intuition).
On the one hand, then, subsumption under
a concept requires that the representation of
an object be homogeneous with the concept,
but, on the other hand, Kant’s theory of con-
cepts requires that intuitions and concepts
are two distinct types of mental representa-
tion – that is, they are heterogeneous. Kant’s
task in the schematism chapter is to explain,
in the light of this heterogeneity, how sub-
sumption under a concept is possible.
268
According to Kant, subsumption under a
concept requires the use of a schema.
If concepts and intuitions were ultimately
a single type of mental representation, as they
were for his predecessors, e.g. → Leibniz and
→ Hume, then there would be no apparent
problem explaining how subsumption works.
If, for example, they were both like images (à
la Hume), they would be genuinely homoge-
neous, so the intuition and concept could be
directly compared. However, when concepts
and intuitions are different types of mental
representation (heterogeneous), there must
be some third thing that can mediate between
them (A138=B177)  – something that trans-
forms the discursive content in a concept into
determinate intuitive content. This third thing
is a schema and Kant holds that a concept
‘is always related immediately to the schema
of the imagination, as a rule for the determi-
nation of our intuition in accordance with a
certain general concept’ (A141=B180).
According to Kant, the schema of a concept
is the ‘representation of a general procedure
of the imagination for providing a concept
with its image’ (A140=B179–180) (→ imagi-
nation). With empirical concepts, ‘the image is
a product of the empirical faculty [Vermögen]
of productive imagination’ (A141=B181). For
example, with the concept of a dog ‘my imag-
ination can specify the shape of a four-footed
animal in general, without being restricted to
any single particular shape that experience
offers me or any possible image that I can
exhibit in concreto’ (A141=B180).
With mathematical concepts, for example
the concept of a triangle, the schema ‘signi-
fies a rule of the synthesis of the imagination
with regard to pure shapes in space’, and ‘is a
product and as it were a monogram of pure a
priori imagination’ (A141–142=B180–181).
Schemata for pure concepts, however,
are not rules for producing spatial images.

According to Kant, ‘[t]he schema of a pure
concept of the understanding, on the con-
trary, is something that can never be brought
to an image at all, but is rather only the
pure synthesis, in accord with a rule of unity
according to concepts in general, which the
category expresses, and is a transcendental
product of the imagination, which concerns
the determination of the inner sense in gen-
eral, in accordance with conditions of its
form (time) in regard to all representations
[. . .]’ (A142=B181).
That is, in the case of a pure concept, the
schema produces, or is, a transcendental time
determination (A138–139=B177–178). For
example, the schema for the pure concept
of substance is ‘the persistence of the real in
time’, ‘[t]he schema of actuality is existence
at a determinate time’, and ‘[t]he schema of
necessity is the existence of an object at all
times’ (A144–145=B183–184).
The schematism chapter is important
because in the Transcendental Deduction (→
deduction) Kant has proven that experience
is only possible through the categories, but
in the Analytic of Principles (→ Analogies
of Experience, Axioms of Intuition,
Anticipations of Perception) the goal is to
prove that those categories have objective
use (A161=B200), that is, application to spa-
tiotemporal objects. To do this, the condi-
tions for subsumption under a concept must
be specified and this is what schemata do.
‘Thus the schemata of the concepts of pure
understanding are the true and sole condi-
tions for providing them with a relation to
objects, thus with significance [Bedeutung]
[. . .]’ (A145–146=B185).
For all of its importance for Kant’s theory
of concepts and the Analytic of the Principles,
the biggest concern with Kant’s exposition of
the schematism is his lack of explanation of
the precise details of the procedure. Kant in
269
Key Themes and Topics
fact tells us that ‘their mere form is a hidden
art in the depths of the human soul, whose
true operations we can divine from nature
and lay unveiled before our eyes only with
difficulty’ (A141=B180–181).
This lack of detail becomes particularly
acute with the schemata for the categories.
With the schemata for pure concepts, Kant
forgoes the ‘dry and boring analysis of what
is required for transcendental schemata of
pure concepts of the understanding in gen-
eral’ (A142=B181), and he simply lists their
schemata without any argument for their
correctness. – SB
Further Reading
H. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.
An Interpretation and Defense, revised
and enlarged edition (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004), ch. 8.
S. Bayne, Kant on Causation. On the Fivefold
Route to the Principle of Causation
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004), ch. 1.
M. Pendlebury, ‘Making sense of
Kant’s schematism’, Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 55,4 (1995):
777–797.
Science → natural science,
metaphysics, critique
Self-activity → spontaneity
Self-legislation → freedom
Sensation → Anticipations of
Perception
Sensibility → experience
Key Themes and Topics
Space → Transcendental
Aesthetic, geometry,
Antinomies
Spontaneity
Kant contrasts spontaneity with receptiv-
ity, where spontaneity is the way in which
an empirical object is cognized by means of
the representations that are first received by
the mind (A50=B74). Cognition arises from
these two ‘fundamental sources of the mind’,
that is, from the combination of the sponta-
neity and receptivity of the power of repre-
sentation (B130–131). More precisely, it is
‘concepts [which] are [. . .] grounded on the
spontaneity of thinking, as sensible intuitions
are grounded on the receptivity of impres-
sions’ (B93), whose combination yields →
knowledge.
The spontaneity of cognition is the under-
standing determining the manifold, rather
than being the determinable, which is the
manifold given to it (B150–152; see also
B156–157n.). The spontaneity of the deter-
minative understanding is uncaused, that is,
itself not further determinable as to its cause,
but is also only a spontaneously determining
cause relative to the receptivity in empirical
intuition and therefore cannot be determined
absolutely (cf. B430).
Spontaneity is linked to Kant’s notion
of a priori → synthesis. The spontaneity
of thought rests on the idea that because a
concept rests on a function, viz. the unity of
an action of ordering different representa-
tions under a common one (A68=B93), our
thought or understanding must first run
through the manifold of impressions, given
by means of receptivity, in order to have a
unified representation. This action is synthe-
sis, which is required for the combination
of a manifold of representations to form an
270
objective unity that refers to an object of pos-
sible experience. In abstraction from a con-
crete empirical manifold and its unification
in an act of synthesis, the act of thought is
‘merely the logical function and hence the
sheer spontaneity of combining the manifold
of a merely possible intuition’ (B428).
However, the ‘sheer spontaneity’ of thought,
‘taken in itself’ (ibid.) does not imply a theo-
retical grasp of the absolute spontaneity of
the thinking agent, the ‘I’, that is, as itself an
uncaused cause in the absolute, metaphysical
sense (→ Paralogisms). Nevertheless, in con-
trast to the relative spontaneity of thought in
theoretical cognition, reason always seeks ‘an
absolute causal spontaneity beginning from
itself ’ (A446=B474), a cause that is uncaused
by the causal chain of natural mechanisms
(cf. A533=B561; A445ff.=B473ff.) (→
Antinomies). Such a cause has particular rel-
evance in relation to the possibility of tran-
scendental → freedom.
This notion of transcendental freedom as
a self-determining cause outside the ‘continu-
ous natural chain’ (CPrR 95) plays a crucial
role in the way we must conceive of ourselves
as rational agents, who rather than possessing
the relative spontaneity of a ‘turnspit’ (CPrR
97) – where freedom would for instance con-
sist merely in the subjective representation of
the ‘mechanism of nature’, a kind of ‘autom-
aton [. . .] spirituale’ (ibid.)  – must be seen
as having ‘absolute spontaneity’ to freely will
an action (CPrR 48; cf. LM 269).
In the latter case, the agent possesses the
capacity of‘pure self-activity [Selbstthätigkeit]’
of reason, by means of which he ‘distinguishes
himself from all other things, even from
himself insofar as he is affected by objects’
(G  452). This must be seen in contrast to
the self-activity of the understanding, which
‘though [. . .] does not, like sense, contain
merely representations that arise when we are

affected by things (and are thus passive), yet
[. . .] can produce from its activity no other
concepts than those which serve merely to
bring sensible representations under rules’
(G 452). Here, self-activity rests on the func-
tion of combination that the understanding
must operate in order for a given manifold of
representations to have a synthetic structure,
which is ‘not given through objects’ (B130).
Self-activity in this sense is thus merely rela-
tive to the need for combination of the sensi-
ble manifold in receptivity that the manifold
itself does not contain. → Reason, on the
other hand, shows to be ‘a spontaneity so
pure that it thereby goes far beyond anything
that sensibility ever can afford it’ (G 452;
emphasis added).
Kant thus appears to discriminate between
the spontaneity involved in the act of under-
standing, which is linked to receptivity, and
the absolute spontaneity of reason, which
is far removed from it. Herein, Kant’s con-
cept of spontaneity must be distinguished
from that of his successors such as Fichte
and Hegel, who clearly conflated the two
capacities. – DS
Further Reading
H. Allison, ‘Kant on freedom: A reply to my
critics’, in Idealism and Freedom. Essays
on Kant’s Theoretical and Practical
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), pp. 109–128, esp.
pt. IV.
H. Allison, ‘Autonomy and spontaneity
in Kant’s conception of the self’, in
H. Allison, Idealism and Freedom,
pp. 129–142.
R. Pippin, ‘Kant on the spontaneity of
mind’, in Idealism as Modernism.
Hegelian Variations (Cambridge:
271
Key Themes and Topics
Cambridge University Press, 1997),
pp. 29–55.
Sublime
In the early work Obs, Kant presents an
anthropological examination that distin-
guishes the feeling of the beautiful from the
sublime. The first section of this work exam-
ines the different manners in which various
objects arouse these pleasurable feelings. The
second and third sections extend these obser-
vations and draw from them distinct features
of human beings in general and of the two
sexes (Obs 211–227, 228–243).
Roughly, sublimity has to do with moral and
noble qualities and is diametrically opposed
to the ridiculous, while beauty is closely asso-
ciated with refinement and tenderness and is
opposed to disgust. The last section offers a
differentiation between national characteris-
tics, based on the particular proportions of
beauty and sublimity in them.
In the Critical period, the Analytic of the
Sublime in CJ draws a comparison between
the beautiful and the sublime as the two
types of pure → aesthetic judgment. They are
both characterized as unique feelings that are
the affective aspect of a particular relation
between two cognitive faculties. Therefore,
although they are triggered by natural objects
or events, their ‘satisfaction does not depend
on a sensation [. . .] nor on a determinate con-
cept’ (CJ 244). Both judgments are charac-
terized as singular, disinterested, universally
valid, subjectively purposive and necessary.
The sublime is awakened by an amorphous
object, which appears to be extensively unlim-
ited, and is therefore related to the quantity
of the representation. It is a feeling ‘that
arises only indirectly’ (CJ 245). Specifically,
Key Themes and Topics
judgments of the sublime involve a negative
interaction between the → imagination and
→ reason. The imagination apprehends the
object, but its lack of → form is contrapurpo-
sive and our finite imagination is inadequate
to encompass it. The imagination comes face
to face with its own boundaries. Therefore,
sublimity is felt as displeasure. Indirectly
however, the mind ‘is incited to abandon sen-
sibility and to occupy itself with ideas that
contain a higher purposiveness’ (CJ 246).
The sublime is divided into two forms: (1)
the mathematical sublime is related to the
faculty of cognition, whereas (2) the dynami-
cal sublime is related to the faculty of desire
(CJ 247). Each of these judgments expresses
a different disposition of the mind to its fail-
ure of representation and provokes a distinc-
tive idea of reason. Both are ‘similar to the
moral disposition’ (CJ 268).
The mathematical sublime is aroused by a
representation of ‘raw nature’ (CJ 253) that is
absolutely or incomparably great. The imagi-
nation fails in its attempt to estimate aestheti-
cally such a totality. But ‘even to be able to
think the given infinite without contradiction
requires a faculty in the human mind that is
itself supersensible’ (CJ 254). Reason is the
capacity that redirects the mind to attempt to
grasp this totality by means of the ‘idea of the
absolute whole’ (CJ 260). Sublimity, then, is
the feeling of respect for the ‘superiority of the
rational vocation of our cognitive faculty over
the greatest faculty of sensibility’ (CJ 257).
The dynamical sublime, conversely, is pro-
voked by a fearful representation of natural
power (CJ 260). Its immeasurability exposes
our vulnerability and ‘physical powerless-
ness’ (CJ 261). But indirectly, it makes us
recognize that as moral subjects we are not
threatened by and, therefore, are independ-
ent of and indeed superior to nature (CJ
261–262). – AR
272
Further Reading
H. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: a
Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), ch. 13.
R. Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the
Revelation of Freedom (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
P. Crowther, The Kantian Sublime. From
Morality to Art (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989).
J.-F. Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the
Sublime, trans. E. Rottenberg (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1994).
Substance → Analogies of
Experience, Paralogisms
Synthesis (synthetic a priori)
The concept of synthesis is central to Kant’s
Critical philosophy, in particular to the
arguments of the → deduction and the →
Analogies in CPR. It forms the core of his
analysis of the possibility of → knowledge.
Synthesis accounts for the possibility of
establishing a unity in a manifold of rep-
resentations, which in the series of states
of consciousness ‘would never constitute a
whole’ (A103), from which alone cognition
can arise, without it. Kant follows → Hume
in believing that the unity of representations
is not ipso facto given with the successive
generation of a manifold of representations.
Neither is the analytic unity among subor-
dinated series of conceptual representations
sufficient for our thoughts to yield knowl-
edge of objects.
This is so because of the nature of our
discursive thought. If we did not recognize
in consciousness that a unity obtains among

the multitude representations, any represen-
tation, ‘as contained in one moment’, would
just be an ‘absolute unity’ (A99), rather than
a synthetic whole. ‘[E]very individual repre-
sentation’ would be ‘isolated and separated’
(A97) from every other. Therefore, ‘in order
for unity of intuition to come from this mani-
fold [. . .], it is necessary first to run through
and then take together this manifoldness
[Mannigfaltigkeit], which action I call the
synthesis of apprehension’ (A99).
In fact, the way in which the manifold
‘as such, and indeed as contained in one
representation’ (ibid.) can be represented is
by means of a discursive synthesis, namely
‘through [. . .] successive addition of one to
the other’ (A103). In other words, the very
manifold can only be conceived as manifold
through synthesis, which gives it unity.
In the run-up to the Deduction, in §10,
where Kant provides the clue to the discov-
ery of the categories, Kant defines synthesis
as ‘the action of putting different representa-
tions together with each other and compre-
hending their manifoldness in one cognition’
(A77=B103). Although at first Kant describes
synthesis in general as ‘the mere effect of the
imagination, of a blind though indispensable
function of the soul’ (B103=A78) (signifi-
cantly, in his own copy of CPR Kant sub-
stitutes ‘understanding’ for ‘soul’), later he
makes clear that synthesis is always either an
act of the understanding (B130), or an effect
of the understanding (B151–152). At any
rate, ‘pure synthesis [. . .] yields the pure con-
cept of the understanding’ (A78=B104), i.e.
the category, which is an a priori synthesis,
or a ‘synthesis in accordance with concepts
(ibid.). The set of the categories are the set of
the functions of a priori synthesis.
Whereas in the A-Deduction Kant
appears to differentiate more obviously
between the various aspects of a priori
273
Key Themes and Topics
synthesis  – ‘synthesis of apprehension in
the intuition’, ‘synthesis of reproduction in
the imagination’ and ‘synthesis of recogni-
tion in concepts’ (A98–100) – so that it thus
seems as if separable acts of synthesizing are
involved of which only the last is an act of
the understanding, in the B-Deduction it is
made sufficiently clear that all a priori syn-
theses come down to ‘an action of the under-
standing’ (B130).
This is only logical, as Kant means a pri-
ori synthesis as an original unitary ground of
cognition, more fundamental than which no
ground can be given. It is this original unity,
also called ‘the original-synthetic unity of
apperception’ (B131, heading) (→ appercep-
tion) that ‘makes the concept of combina-
tion’, and hence any synthesis, ‘first possible’
since nothing is combined if not by an act
of combination (B131). This possibility rests
on the → spontaneity of the act of synthesiz-
ing of the manifold of representations so as
to yield a unity among one’s representations
that constitutes conceptual knowledge.
Later in the B-Deduction, Kant differenti-
ates between intellectual synthesis and figu-
rative synthesis, also called transcendental
synthesis of the → imagination (B151–152),
which accounts for the difference between
respectively the a priori combination of con-
ceptual representations in a judgment and
the equally a priori combination of repre-
sentations in a concrete empirical intuition,
which together give a judgment objective
validity. The figurative synthesis in produc-
tive imagination is then not a distinct act
of combination, but ‘an effect of the under-
standing on sensibility’ (B152) or the way the
understanding affects → inner sense (B155).
The a priori synthesis of the productive
imagination, which is the spontaneity of
the understanding that affects inner sense,
must be distinguished from the reproductive
Key Themes and Topics
imagination, ‘whose synthesis is subject solely
to empirical laws, namely those of association’,
which belongs not to transcendental philosophy
but to → psychology (B152; cf. B139–140).
The synthetic a priori plays a pivotal role
in all of Kant’s arguments in CPR after the
Deduction, in particular of course in the
chapter that deals with the synthetic a priori
principles that govern possible experience,
viz. the → Axioms of Intuitions →, the →
Anticipations of Perception, the → Analogies
of Experience and the → Postulates of
Empirical Thinking in General.
But the concept of synthesis also plays a
significant role in the Dialectic, in particular
in the First and Second → Antinomies and
in the → transcendental ideal, where Kant
argues for an even more fundamental synthe-
sis than the synthesis of the understanding,
namely a ‘synthesis of all predicates which
are to make up the complete concept of a
thing’; this synthesis constitutes the ‘transcen-
dental presupposition [. . .] of the material of
all possibility, which is supposed to contain
a priori the data for the particular possibility
of every thing’ (A572–573=B600–601).
Here, synthesis is not meant as the formal
necessary condition of conceiving of a unified
manifold of representations so as to determine
an → object as → appearance, but as the meta-
physical condition, viz. the principle of thor-
oughgoing determination, that first enables the
individual thing in its very being, as a → thing
in itself. This synthesis involves a concept, or →
idea, which can never be exhibited in concreto,
in contrast to the synthesis of the pure con-
cept of the understanding that by means of an
empirical intuition can thus be exhibited. – DS
Further Reading
H. Hoppe, Synthesis bei Kant (Berlin/New
York: de Gruyter, 1983).
274
P. Kitcher, Kant’s Thinker (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. 8.
B. Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to
Judge (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1998), chs 1, 2, 8 and 9.
D. Schulting, Kant’s Deduction and
Apperception. Explaining the Categories
(Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012).
Synthetic a priori (judgment) →
synthesis, judgment, Analogies
of Experience
Synthetic judgment → judgment
System
The notion of ‘system’ is, for Kant, intrin-
sically linked with scientific knowledge:
a systematic unity makes a system out of
an aggregate of → knowledge, which then
serves as the basis for scientific knowledge
(B860ff.). ‘System’ here means the unity of
various cognitions (as parts) under an →
idea (B860; cf. B673). This idea, which is
a concept of → reason, determines a priori
the limits of its parts as well as their place
within the whole. The intrinsic relation-
ship between whole and parts, as well as
between the parts themselves, ensures that
the system will only expand through inter-
nal differentiation, like an organism, and
not through an external addition of parts
(B860ff.).
Furthermore, the → form of a system is
not an external feature of reason, but reason
itself, for reason is by nature architectonic
(e.g. B502, 673, 676, 835) and systematic
(B765ff.). In this subjective respect, reason
aims at totality: with reason we form a

unity out of our cognitions. Hence reason,
in the broad sense, deals with itself (cf. e.g.
B708).
Systematicity is a general characteristic of
both philosophy and scientific knowledge.
Undoubtedly, Kant thought of Euclidean
→ geometry, Aristotelian → logic, or the
mechanics of → Newton and Kepler, as para-
digmatic systems. However, for methodolog-
ical reasons such systems cannot adequately
deal with the question of their foundation.
Especially the mathematical → method with
its axiomatic-deductive proofs (→ proof)
shows crucial shortcomings in the way it
can scientifically justify its own axioms, or,
presuppositions.
Kant, therefore, introduces a new method
for philosophy, namely → transcendental phi-
losophy. Contrary to many of his predecessors,
for Kant the ground of the validity of a system
cannot be a system external to reason itself. The
system of knowledge and the system of what is
known, respectively the subject and object of
knowledge, must be intrinsically related.
However, for Kant the systematic unity of rea-
son itself does not have a constitutive function.
On the contrary, the unity of reason has merely
a regulative function that unites the knowledge
of the understanding. Consequently, Kant denies
that the unity of reason has objective reality. The
system as architectonic unity thus is merely a
regulative → idea of reason (→ regulative princi-
ples). The unity of reason remains a postulate; it
is not the concept of an object of possible experi-
ence, but the idea of the thoroughgoing unity of
knowledge gained by understanding (B670ff.).
In CJ Kant broadens his concept of a sys-
tem, as nature too is now taken, by virtue
of the power of reflective judgment, to be a
system (→ teleology). But he holds on to the
regulative status of this unity. In OP, Kant
then tries to transform the subjective unity
into an objective one.
275
Key Themes and Topics
As far as the internal structure of the sys-
tem of transcendental philosophy is concerned,
according to Kant it consists of, roughly speak-
ing, a level of → critique and a level of → meta-
physics, also called ‘doctrine’. In conformity
with this general structure, Kant’s final system
of philosophy has three critical parts and two
doctrinal parts: the critical parts provide a
radical foundation for the determination of the
objects to be determined in the doctrinal parts.
In particular, it was Kant’s view that the
unity of reason merely has a regulative, subjec-
tive character which inspired the development
of post-Kantian idealism towards a conception
of a system of philosophy that should over-
come Kant’s dualistic model of constitutive
and regulative principles. The post-Kantians
strived for a higher form of unity of reason:
one that incorporates a constitutive function.
Reason then turns out not to be a system in a
merely subjective way aiming at systematiza-
tion, but reason is also a system in an objec-
tive sense: it is the constitutive foundation for
possible objectivity, and hence not only regu-
lative for the knowing subject. – CK
Further Reading
P. Abela, ‘The demands of systematicity:
rational judgment and the structure of
nature’, in G. Bird (ed.), A Companion
to Kant (Malden, MA/Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010), pp. 408–422.
H. Fulda, J. Stolzenberg (eds), System
der Vernunft. Kant und der deutsche
Idealismus. Bd. 1, Architektonik
und System in der Philosophie Kants
(Hamburg: Meiner, 2001).
P. Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and
Freedom: Selected Essays (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Key Themes and Topics
N. Rescher, Kant and the Reach of Reason
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), ch. 4.
Table of categories →
deduction
Table of judgment → deduction,
judgment
Taste → aesthetic judgment
Teleological judgment →
teleology, judgment
Teleology (purposiveness, end)
Teleology or purposiveness is essential to
descriptions of rational agency and seems to
be unproblematic. This is not at all the case
in descriptions of natural laws and proc-
esses (→ laws (of nature)/lawfulness), which
according to the canons of modern science
are blind rather than purposive.
Teleological notions and ideas are preva-
lent in Kant’s works. They appear already in
the pre-Critical period (most notably perhaps
in OPD 87–89; see also ND 412–416).
In the Critical period, teleology is impor-
tant in two related contexts. First, the
assumption that organisms are to be viewed
teleologically or purposively is fundamental
in the biological papers on race (DR, HR,
UTP) and it underwrites Kant’s conception
of universal history and the development of
humankind: ‘All natural predispositions of a
creature are determined sometime to develop
themselves completely and purposively [. . .]
An organ that is not to be used, an arrange-
ment that does not attain to its end, is a
276
contradiction in the teleological doctrine of
nature.’ (UH 18)
It is, however, only in the Analytic of the
Teleological Power of Judgment of CJ that
Kant systematically elaborates the claim that
organisms (including human beings), their
organs, systems and capacities are viewed as
if they were designed to serve ends.
Second, in the ‘Appendix’ to the
Transcendental Dialectic of CPR and in the
‘Introduction’ to CJ, Kant appears to claim
that the assumption of the purposiveness of
nature is a necessary transcendental condition
of experience and knowledge generally. We
necessarily regard nature as though it were
made to be known by our distinctive cognitive
faculties. Although his language can some-
times be misleading, Kant consistently regards
teleology as an assumption only, however, and
never asserts that there are teleological forces
or purposive beings in nature; nowhere does
he contradict the modern scientific commit-
ment to blind mechanistic causality.
It is of great importance to see that the point
of departure of the Analytic in CJ is the fact that
we commonly speak of organisms as if they
were self-organizing beings. For this fundamen-
tal fact implies in itself that we view them as
goal-directed. Kant writes: ‘An organized prod-
uct of nature is that in which everything is an
end and reciprocally a means as well. Nothing
in it is in vain, purposeless, or to be ascribed to
a blind mechanism of nature.’ (CJ 376)
Again, despite such misleading language,
Kant is not asserting that certain natural
objects are purposive. Teleology is simply the
conceptual framework through which we
judge these objects. Kant writes:
[I]n teleology we certainly talk about
nature as if the purposiveness in it were
intentional, but at the same time ascribe
this intention to nature, i.e., to matter, by
which we would indicate (since there can

be no misunderstanding here, because no
intention in the strict sense of the term
can be attributed to any lifeless matter)
that this term signifies here only a princi-
ple of the reflecting, not of the determin-
ing power of judgment, and is thus not
meant to introduce any special ground of
causality [. . .]. (CJ 383)
Although we describe organisms teleologi-
cally, all natural laws and so all scientific
explanations are mechanistic, as Kant
asserts:
It is of infinite importance to reason that
it not allow the mechanism of nature
in its productions to drop out of sight
and be bypassed in its explanations; for
without this no insight into the nature of
things can be attained. (CJ 410)
Apparently, Kant never argues for the claim
that we must judge certain objects as purpo-
sive. He simply assumes we do. Moreover,
organic life is not a necessary phenomenon
(CJ 193–194, 359–360). What then grounds
his claim that teleological judgment is neces-
sary? On the prevalent interpretation, Kant
claims that the assumption that nature is
purposive for our cognitive capacities directs
us to search for more general and more spe-
cific empirical regularities and so erect a
more unified and comprehensive → system
of knowledge. This methodology is indeed a
presupposition of the empirical investigation
of nature. But it is not a necessary condition
of any empirical → experience and cannot
properly be said to be → transcendental.
On the stronger and controversial read-
ing, the very employment of any empirical
universal concept presupposes that nature
is constituted by such universal regularities
and is, in this manner, purposive for our
277
Key Themes and Topics
discursive minds. Our very employment of
universal empirical concepts attributes to
nature a greater unity than a finite mind can
ever encounter. The assumption that nature
is purposive for our conceptual minds is thus
a necessary condition of our employment of
any empirical concept. This may explain why
Kant claims that the ‘principle of the purpo-
siveness of nature (in the multiplicity of its
empirical laws) is a transcendental principle’
(CJ 181).
Finally, in the Methodology of the
Teleological Power of Judgment, Kant argues
that the purposiveness we attribute to any
organism necessarily leads to the question
why it exists and this, in turn, to the idea
of the ultimate end of creation. The human
being as moral is ‘alone capable of being a
final end, to which the whole of nature is
teleologically subordinated’ (CJ 436). Thus,
there is ‘a physical teleology which gives our
theoretically reflecting power of judgment
a sufficient basis for assuming the existence
of an intelligent world-cause’ (CJ 447). This
theoretical argument is the counterpart of the
argument of Kant’s practical philosophy for
the highest good as the final end of creation,
which is a ‘moral teleology’ (CJ 447). – IG
Further Reading
I. Geiger, ‘Is the assumption of a systematic
whole of empirical concepts a necessary
condition of knowledge?’, Kant-Studien
94 (2003): 273–298.
I. Geiger, ‘Is teleological judgment (still)
necessary? Kant’s arguments in the
Analytic and in the Dialectic of
Teleological Judgment’, British Journal
for the History of Philosophy 17 (2009):
533–566.
Key Themes and Topics
P. McLaughlin, Kant’s Critique of Teleology
in Biological Explanation (Lewiston, NY:
Edwin Mellen, 1990).
M. Quarfood, ‘The antinomy of
teleological judgment’, in M. Quarfood,
Transcendental Idealism and the
Organism (Stockholm: Almqvist &
Wiksell, 2004), pp. 160–208.
Thing in itself
In the Preface to the B-edition of CPR, Kant
first contrasts appearances (→ appearance)
with ‘things as they are in themselves’ (Bxx),
and then explains that his Critical approach
(→ critique) to the problem of pure specu-
lative reason has the consequence that ‘we
can have cognition of no object as a thing
in itself’ (Bxxvi). Kant’s justification for
the latter claim follows from his proofs, in
the → Transcendental Aesthetic, that space
(A26=B42) and time (A32=B49) do not rep-
resent properties of things in themselves;
as a result, we do not gain cognitive access
to things in themselves when we acquire →
knowledge of spatiotemporal objects. The
notion of ‘thing in itself’ is thus introduced
to refer to things as they are independently of
our cognition.
This can be interpreted in a number of
ways: (a) as a purely methodological claim,
namely that the objects of our spatiotemporal
knowledge can be considered independently
of this spatiotemporal mode of access, i.e. as
they are in themselves; (b) as a metaphysi-
cal claim about the different modes of access
to what we know as spatiotemporal objects,
which defines a perspective upon them that
transcends cognition, and from which they
are viewed as they are in themselves; (c) as a
metaphysical claim about the nature of things
278
which belong to a world that is distinct from
our spatiotemporal world of appearances; (d)
as a metaphysical claim about the nature of
things which do not thereby define a world
that is distinct from that of our spatiotem-
poral objects. These are the methodological
and metaphysical two-aspect theories, the
two-world, and the two-perspective theories
respectively, which have become standard in
the Anglophone Kant literature (→ transcen-
dental idealism).
While no knowledge of reality in itself
is possible, Kant does allow for us to have
thoughts about things as they are in them-
selves (Bxxvi); he adds that in so doing, we
would be thinking of them as that which
appears as the objects of our spatiotemporal
→ experience (ibid.). In thinking of things in
themselves, a useful tool is the concept of the
‘transcendental object’ (B63; A109), by which
Kant refers to the general conceptual struc-
ture of an → object. Kant sometimes uses this
to refer to things in themselves (A380; B506;
B522; A613–614=B641–642), but, impor-
tantly, no knowledge claim is made through
this use, not even that the thing in itself is an
object of any particular sort.
To think of things in themselves is to think
of an intelligible world, and in the → Dialectic
of CPR, Kant will both dismantle the claims
made by traditional → metaphysics of cogni-
tive access to truths about the soul, the world,
and God, while showing in what way reason
necessarily forms ideas about the intelligible
world which regulate the progress of our
knowledge (→ Paralogisms; → Antinomies;
→ proofs of the existence of God; → regu-
lative principles). Barring cognitive access to
the intelligible world has a further systematic
function in Kant’s Critical system: as Kant
puts it, ‘I had to deny knowledge in order
to make room for faith’ (Bxxx): Kant shows
that belief in God and the immortality of

the soul are required by → morality (A809–
811=B837–839; CPrR 121–133).
Our epistemic situation with respect to
things in themselves is, however, not only
characterized by the prohibition of knowl-
edge (A42=B59). Indeed, first, while it is
not possible to know anything about things
in themselves, there is evidence that Kant
endorsed the minimal claim that things in
themselves exist (P 315), although this is a
contentious issue among commentators. It
is however initially not clear how it is pos-
sible to make such a claim, as it seems to go
beyond the bounds of knowledge established
in the Analytic of CPR.
Second, if we are to think of things in
themselves as appearing as spatiotemporal
objects, for such appearances to come about
it is necessary that our sensibility be first
affected (A19=B33): this is a transcenden-
tal condition of appearing. This relation of
affection is typically interpreted as involving
things in themselves having a causal impact
upon us, although there are interpreters who
rather understand spatiotemporal objects
as the prime candidates for what affects us,
and others who view the need for a combi-
nation of both, i.e. hold a theory of double
affection.
These two controversial issues of the
existence of, and affection by, things in them-
selves, come together in a way that Kant’s
contemporary Friedrich Jacobi (1743–1819)
famously deemed to amount to an inconsist-
ency in Kant’s Critical system. Jacobi com-
plained that, while it is not possible to enter
this system without presupposing the exist-
ence of the thing in itself, neither is it possi-
ble to affirm its existence within the system.
There are, additionally, arguably grounds
for viewing such existence claims as denied
by Kant himself. Kant considers the possi-
bility of objects of knowledge that are not
279
Key Themes and Topics
phenomenal, i.e. not objects of our sensible
intuition. These he calls noumena, and while
noumena are characterized only negatively
(B306), one can also consider a positive
characterization of noumena as objects of a
non-human non-sensible type of cognition,
i.e. of an intellectual intuition or intuitive
understanding (B307). Kant clearly says that
we cannot claim that positive noumena exist
(A286–287=B343). Such a denial of the pos-
sibility of existence claims about noumena in
the positive sense does not, however, trans-
late into a denial that things in themselves
exist unless these things are thereby claimed
to be objects of some sort (noumena). Rather,
Jacobi’s claim that it is not possible to claim
that things in themselves exist can be refuted
by pointing to the difference between deter-
minate knowledge of things in themselves
(which is denied by Kant) and indetermi-
nate knowledge of something that affects us,
something, of which we cannot even say that
it is an object but is nonetheless presupposed
as a ground for knowledge.
Jacobi’s complaint set the scene for the
post-Kantian dismissive attitude to things in
themselves. The German Idealists Schelling
and Hegel dispensed with the notion of thing
in itself altogether by seeking a ground to
their systems of thought that does not appeal
to anything beyond thought. Schopenhauer,
on the contrary, did away with the denial
that knowledge of things in themselves is a
possibility, by claiming that in fact reality in
itself is ‘the Will’, as opposed to the represen-
tations to which we have access in our nor-
mal cognition. – CO
Further reading
Adickes, E., Kant und das Ding an sich
(Berlin: Pan, 1924).
Key Themes and Topics
Allison, H., Kant’s Transcendental Idealism:
An Interpretation and Defense, revised
and enlarged edition (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004), ch. 3.
Prauss, G., Kant und das Problem der Dinge
an sich (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974).
Schulting, D., J. Verburgt (eds), Kant’s
Idealism. New Interpretations of a
Controversial Doctrine (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2011).
Thoroughgoing determination
→ transcendental ideal
Time → transcendental AESTHETIC,
Antinomies, schematism
Transcendent →
transcendental
Transcendental
Kant generally uses the notion ‘transcenden-
tal’ to restrict the scope of a subject in terms
of the a priori requirements for → experi-
ence, which have their origin in our cogni-
tive faculties rather than in objects. So, for
example, Kant writes that ‘I call all cognition
transcendental that is occupied not so much
with objects but rather with our mode of cog-
nition of objects insofar as this is to be pos-
sible a priori’ (B25) (→ a priori, a posteriori).
Thus, transcendental logic, as opposed to gen-
eral → logic, which applies to all ‘representa-
tions wherever they may have originated’, is
restricted to representations that ‘are origi-
nally given a priori in ourselves’ (A56=B80).
Transcendental, however, can also mod-
ify the use or employment of a transcen-
dental principle. It is given transcendental
employment when we attempt to apply it to
something that is not an object of possible
280
experience  – when we give it ‘a use that
reaches out beyond the boundaries of experi-
ence’ (A296=B352–353).
Both senses of transcendental are to be
contrasted with the term transcendent. A
transcendent principle is one that inherently
denies that our theoretical cognition is lim-
ited to the boundaries of experience. On the
contrary, it is ‘a principle that takes away
these limits, which indeed bids us to overstep
them, [and therefore] is called transcendent’
(A296=B353). – SB
Transcendental Aesthetic
(intuition, space, time)
Kant’s epistemology is constructed upon a
model of cognition that assumes a distinc-
tion between the faculties of sensibility and
understanding  – with the addition of the
faculty of → reason to account for the role
of theory in → knowledge. The separation
between sensibility and the understanding
reflects a distinction between two types of
→ representation, intuitions and concepts.
Intuitions are characterized as immediate
representations of an object (A19=B33), but
also as the representation of a particular
(A32=B47–48) (→ intuition). Both charac-
teristics distinguish intuitions from concepts:
concepts are universal representations, which
represent objects only through the mediation
of intuitions (A19=B33).
In making this distinction, Kant apportions
a passive role to sensibility, in contrast to the
active role of the understanding discussed in
the Transcendental Analytic (B129–130) (→
spontaneity). Sensibility thus has the func-
tion of receiving a manifold of sensations,
which are located spatially and temporally in
an intuitive representation (A20=B34).

In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant’s task
is to examine intuitive representations, with
the aim of identifying any eventual a priori
contribution made by intuitions to the cog-
nition of objects. Unlike the Transcendental
Analytic, which first has to identify con-
cepts that have a transcendental function
(this occurs in the so-called Metaphysical
Deduction; → deduction), the intuitions
of space and time are already known to be
the subject matter of the Transcendental
Aesthetic.
On the other hand, unlike the categories,
the nature of space and time as intuitive
representations is problematic. Aside from
dealing with this issue (A24–25=B39–40;
A31–32=B47–48), the ‘Metaphysical
Exposition’ establishes the → a priori nature
of the representations of space and time. This
identifies them as having a → transcendental
function in cognition, and as accounting for
the possibility of certain synthetic a priori
judgments (e.g. those of → geometry in the
case of space, B40–41).
Kant presents two arguments for the intu-
itive nature of the representations of space
(and similar arguments in the case of time).
The part-whole relations of space are charac-
terized by containment of parts in a unique
all-encompassing space which is logically
prior to them. In the case of a concept, the
relation is different: the concept’s intension is
defined by a set of marks (A320=B377) that
are its parts; but these marks are prior to the
concept. Correlatively, the whole of space
prior to all these parts is unique; this is not
the case for a concept since the concept as a
whole always refers to a potential multiplic-
ity of instances, its extension (→ logic).
Aside from the part–whole relation, space
differs from a conceptual representation in
that it is infinite (in the sense of limitless:
its quantum is infinite). Our understanding
281
Key Themes and Topics
could not grasp a concept defined by an infi-
nite number of marks. A concept’s extension
could be infinite, but this would amount to
an infinity of instances under the concept.
By contrast, an infinity of parts is thought
within space (B39–40): only an intuition
could thus be infinite.
As we shall see, Kant’s claim that the rep-
resentations of space and time are a priori is
at the core of his → transcendental idealism.
His arguments are aimed at philosophers
holding sensationist or constructivist theo-
ries of spatiotemporal cognition, chiefly →
Leibniz and → Locke. The latter view spatial
relations as deriving from non-spatial rela-
tions respectively of monads and sensible
data (and the same goes for time).
Focusing on space (the case of time is
analogous) in his first argument, Kant draws
attention to the impossibility of construct-
ing spatial relations out of non-spatial ones:
space is not derived from empirical data.
What space allows is the representation of
the data in intuition as relating to things that
are taken ‘not merely as different but as in
different places’ (A23=B38). In particular,
space has the transcendental function of ena-
bling the representation of purely numerical
differences in outer sense (→ identity).
The priority of space with respect to
empirical data and its necessity in experi-
ence are confirmed in the second argument.
Kant’s claim that ‘one can never represent
that there is no space’ (A24=B38) establishes
its → necessity, while the claim that ‘one
can very well think that there are no objects
to be encountered in it’ (ibid.) confirms its
priority.
The ‘Transcendental Exposition’ shows
why the representation of space must be an a
priori intuition if the science of geometry is to
be possible. Insofar as geometric judgments
are amplificatory, and not merely clarificatory
Key Themes and Topics
(A7=B10–11; B14–17), they must be synthetic
(→ judgment). This is only possible if spatial
representations enable us to go ‘beyond the
concept’ (B41): they must be intuitions. And
insofar as geometric knowledge is apodictic,
these intuitions must be a priori.
Important metaphysical conclusions are
derived from these epistemological consider-
ations (A26=B42; A32–33=B49–50). Insofar
as the intuition of space is a priori, space
‘represents no property at all of any things in
themselves nor any relation of them to each
other’ (A26=B42). If space is to have the
transcendental functions described above, its
representation cannot be derived from things
in themselves (→ thing in itself).
Therefore, no Leibnizian (relational) or
Newtonian (absolutist) (→ Newton) theory of
space could account for the role of the repre-
sentation of space described above. This, how-
ever, seems to leave a big gap in the argument
to the conclusion that things in themselves are
not spatial. If it has been shown that space is
one of the ‘subjective condition[s] of sensibil-
ity’ (A26=B42), there remains the neglected
alternative (raised by Reinhold and, most
famously, Trendelenburg) that space should
also be a property of things in themselves.
If space (and time), and the ‘extended
beings’ in it, are transcendentally ideal, Kant
claims that space also possesses ‘empirical
reality’ (A26–28=B42–44) (→ reality). That
is, judgments about objects located in space
are valid as long as they are understood to
refer to the human standpoint, i.e. as long as
it is understood that these things ‘be taken as
objects of our sensible intuition’ (ibid.).
As indicated above, the Transcendental
Aesthetic must consider intuitions in abstraction
from concepts. In the → Axioms of Intuition,
Kant shows how the manifold in intuition is
first synthesized under the categories of quan-
tity. This occurs ‘through the synthesis of the
282
manifold through which the representations
of a determinate space or time are generated’
(B202), i.e. the synthesis of composition of
homogeneous parts of the single space. Such a
→ synthesis is thought in the concept of mag-
nitude, so that the appearances we perceive are
all ‘extensive magnitudes’ (B203).
It is this synthesis that Kant refers to in
a famous footnote in the Transcendental
Deduction (B160–161n.), where he explains
that it is presupposed by the unity of space.
This defines space as a ‘formal intuition’,
aside from its general role as ‘form of
intuition’ for the manifold of sensations.
Although this synthesis makes concepts of
space (as in geometry) possible, its unity ‘pre-
cedes all concepts’ (B161n.). The meaning of
this claim is much discussed in the literature.
What it suggests is the possibility of consid-
ering syntheses under a given category (here,
categories of quantity) which do not issue in
a conceptual determination; this has impor-
tant implications for the question of non-
conceptual content in Kant. – CO
Further Reading
H. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism:
An Interpretation and Defense, revised
and enlarged edition (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004), ch. 5.
J. V. Buroker, Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason. An Introduction (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), ch. 3.
L. Falkenstein, Kant’s Intuitionism (Toronto:
Toronto University Press, 1995).
C. Onof, D. Schulting, ‘Space as form of
intuition and as formal intuition. On the
note to B160 in Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason’, The Philosophical Review 124,1
(2015).
L. Shabel, ‘The Transcendental Aesthetic’,
in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge

Companion to Kant’s ‘Critique of
Pure Reason’ (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), pp. 93–117.
Transcendental apperception →
apperception
Transcendental deduction →
deduction
Transcendental Dialectic →
Dialectic
Transcendental idea → idea,
ideas
Transcendental ideal
The doctrine of the transcendental ideal is
not among the most frequently debated ones
in Kant scholarship. Yet it plays quite an
important role in understanding the general
status of the → Dialectic and even the nature
of Kant’s → transcendental idealism. Not
least, the doctrine of the transcendental ideal
of reason is intrinsically connected to the
principle of thoroughgoing determination
since it is this principle for which the ideal of
reason is supposed to serve as transcendental
prototype.
In order to grasp the function of the tran-
scendental ideal, it is crucial to recall Kant’s
definition of an ideal:
[S]omething that seems to be even fur-
ther removed from objective reality than
the idea is what I call the ideal, by which
I understand the idea not merely in con-
creto but in individuo, i.e., as an indi-
vidual thing which is determinable, or
283
Key Themes and Topics
even determined, through the idea alone.
(B596)
This definition shows that the concept of
an ideal is linked exclusively to the → ideas
and principles of reason (→ regulative prin-
ciples), and only indirectly or analogously
to the understanding’s categories and princi-
ples (→ deduction, Analogies of Experience).
Therefore, the object of reason’s ideal is to
be found ‘only in reason’, whereby the ideal
does not signify ‘the objective relation of an
actual object to other things, but only that of
an idea to concepts’ (B606–607). In fact, the
ideal of reason concerns only what Kant calls
an ‘object in the idea’ (B698–699; B724–
725), or a ‘scheme’ (B702, 707, 710–712,
725, 727) for the sake of an idea or principle
of reason, such as the principle of thorough-
going determination.
At the same time, the fact that the object
of reason’s ideal is explicated in theological
terms (e.g. as ens realissimum, ens originarium,
ens summum and ens entium), and especially
Kant’s statement that ‘the ideal of pure reason is
the object of a transcendental theology’ (B608),
seems to worry some scholars. This statement
is best understood in terms of the apparently
transcendental question that is formulated by
Kant towards the end of the section: ‘How
does reason come to regard all the possibility
of things as derived from a single possibility,
namely that of the highest reality, and even to
presuppose these possibilities as contained in a
particular original being [Urwesen]?’ (B609)
On the one hand, Kant asserts that the
answer to this question suggests itself on
the basis of the Analytic by stating, first, that
the possibility of empirical objects, i.e. appear-
ances, is a relation of these objects to our
thought, in which the → form can be thought
a priori while what materially makes up the
→ reality in them has to be given through
Key Themes and Topics
sensation. Secondly, however, there seems to
be more at stake in Kant’s analysis of the ideal
when he writes that ‘the material for the pos-
sibility [Materie zur Möglichkeit] of all objects
of sense has to be presupposed as given in
one sum total [Inbegriffe]’ and that ‘all pos-
sibility of empirical objects, their difference
from one another and their thoroughgoing
determination, can rest only on the limitation
[Einschränkung] of this sum total’ (B610).
Thus, Kant claims that the principle of
thoroughgoing determination presupposes,
as its grounding condition, a transcendental
substrate, a non-empirical notion of materi-
ality, which in turn is identified with the idea
of an omnitudo realitatis. He writes:
[I]f the thoroughgoing determination in
our reason is grounded on a transcenden-
tal substratum, which contains as it were
the entire storehouse of material from
which all possible predicates of things can
be taken, then this substratum is nothing
other than the idea of an All of reality [All
der Realität] (omnitudo realitatis). (B603)
In a sense, Kant’s doctrine of the transcen-
dental ideal centres on the insight that it is
only in the case of omnitudo realitatis that
reason produces the thoroughgoing deter-
mination of what is thought in the idea and
hence is capable of a genuine ideal. Kant
even describes this in terms of the notorious
notion of the → thing in itself, by asserting
that ‘[t]hrough this possession of all reality
[Allbesitz der Realität]’ is a representation
possible of ‘the concept of a thing in itself
which is thoroughly determined’ (B604).
At the same time, from the concept of an
ens realissimum which is the concept of ‘an
individual being’ that is determined by means
of each of all possible predicates that abso-
lutely belong to it, it follows that the idea of
284
omnitudo realitatis not just concerns a tran-
scendental ideal, but also ‘the one single genu-
ine ideal of which human reason is capable’,
as it is ‘only in this one single case an – in itself
universal  – concept of one thing thoroughly
determined through itself, and cognized as the
representation of an individual’ (ibid.).
On the other hand, due to what Kant
calls a transcendental illusion, irremediably
attached to human reason (→ Dialectic),
we have a natural propensity to hypostatize
and personify the idea of the sum total of
all reality. Kant writes that such a hyposta-
tization and personification come about
because, time and again, we dialectically,
that is, illegitimately though unavoidably,
transform ‘the distributive unity of the use
of the understanding in experience, into the
collective unity of a whole of experience’ and
subsequently ‘from this whole of appearance
[. . .] think up an individual thing contain-
ing in itself all empirical reality’, which we
then confuse ‘with the concept of a thing that
stands at the summit of the possibility of all
things, providing the real conditions for their
thoroughgoing determination’ (B610–611).
That is also the reason why Kant stresses
that the objective of the Dialectic is not just ‘to
describe the procedure of our reason and its
dialectic’, but also ‘to discover its sources, so
as to be able to explain this illusion itself [. . .];
for the ideal we are talking about is grounded
on a natural and not a merely arbitrary idea’
(B609). Thus the doctrine of the transcenden-
tal ideal affirms the need, at the level of the
Dialectic, to give a fundamental explanation
for reason’s dialectical proceedings. – JV
Further Reading
J. Ferrari, ‘Das Ideal der reinen Vernunft’, in
G. Mohr, M. Willaschek (eds), Immanuel
Kant. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in

the series Klassiker Auslegen (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 1998), pp. 491–521.
M. Grier, ‘The Ideal of Pure Reason’,
in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Kant’s ‘Critique of
Pure Reason’ (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), pp. 266–289.
J. Verburgt, ‘How to account for reason’s
interest in an ultimate prototype? A note
on Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental
Ideal’, in D. Schulting, J. Verburgt (eds),
Kant’s Idealism. New Interpretations of
a Controversial Doctrine (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2010), pp. 237–254.
Transcendental idealism
(appearance, thing in itself,
phenomena, noumena)
Transcendental idealism centres on a distinc-
tion between things as they appear to us, or
appearances, and things as they are in them-
selves. Kant argues that we cannot have cog-
nition of things as they are in themselves, and
that things as they appear to us are ‘mere rep-
resentations’ (A30=B45), which are in some
way limited to human cognition, or a human
standpoint. The things that appear to us, to
which our knowledge is limited, are objects in
space and time which causally interact with
our senses (→ thing in itself; appearance).
Thus, Kant argues that we cannot have
knowledge of non-spatiotemporal things,
such as God, or Cartesian souls, and that
objects in space and time are in some sense
representations which exist in relation to
human cognition. Transcendental idealism is
first fully presented and argued for in CPR,
and features to some extent in almost all
Kant’s subsequent works.
285
Key Themes and Topics
Kant presents transcendental idealism as
a completely revolutionary position, which
he compares to the Copernican revolu-
tion in astronomy. He says that Copernicus
had the revolutionary thought that what
appear to be movements of heavenly bodies
around the earth might in fact be attributed
to the movement of the earth, the position
from which we observe the heavenly bodies
(Bxvi–Bxvii).
Similarly, Kant proposes that we attribute
some of what appear to be features of the
objects of experience to the experiencing
subject, or to the point of view from which
we cognize the world. Kant argues that this
revolution in thinking about the relation
between subjects and the objects of cogni-
tion will enable us to resolve the question
of whether and how → metaphysics is pos-
sible, to explain the a priori conditions of
empirical → knowledge, to avoid Cartesian
scepticism, to show that metaphysical and
scientific knowledge of God (→ proofs of the
existence of God), free → will (→ freedom)
and immortality (→ Paralogisms) is not pos-
sible, while showing that free will is meta-
physically possible, and making room for the
ideas of God, free will and immortality play-
ing a role in our thinking and morality.
The main places where Kant presents
and argues for the position are the →
Transcendental Aesthetic, which concerns
space and time, and the → Antinomies,
which is part of his critique of traditional
metaphysics. In these sections, he defines
transcendental idealism, respectively, as mak-
ing the following claims:
[A]bsolutely nothing that is intuited in
space is a thing in itself, and that space
is not a form that is proper to any-
thing in itself, but rather that objects in
themselves are not known to us at all,
Key Themes and Topics
and that what we call outer objects are
nothing other than mere representations
of our sensibility, whose form is space,
but whose true correlate, i.e., the thing
in itself, is not and cannot be cognized
through them, but is also never asked
after in experience. (A30=B45)
[E]verything intuited in space or in time,
hence all objects of an experience possi-
ble for us, are nothing but appearances,
i.e., mere representations, which, as they
are represented, as extended beings or
series of alterations, have outside our
thoughts no existence grounded in itself.
(A490–491=B518–519)
Thus, central to understanding the position
is making sense of what it means to say that
objects in space are mere representations, giv-
ing an account of Kant’s reasons for thinking
that we cannot know things in themselves, as
well as an account of what his commitment
to things in themselves amounts to – that is,
whether it is a commitment to an actually
existing aspect of → reality.
In the → Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant
argues that our representation of space (and
then, in parallel arguments, time) is → a pri-
ori (not derived from experience) and is an
→ intuition. The role of intuition, according
to Kant, is to give us the objects about which
we think, something, Kant believes, concepts
could never do. Kant argues that space and
time are the a priori forms of our intuition,
and concludes from this that space ‘represents
no property at all of any things in themselves’
(A26=B42) and that ‘[s]pace is nothing other
than merely the form of all appearances of
outer sense, i.e., the subjective condition of
sensibility, under which alone outer intuition
is possible for us’ (ibid.). A priori intuition is
supposed to explain the possibility of synthetic
a priori knowledge (→ synthesis, Analogies of
Experience), and to lead to idealism.
286
In the Antinomies, Kant argues that the way
we think about the world in the pursuit of empir-
ical knowledge drives us unavoidably to contra-
dictory conclusions, when we try to think about
the extent of the world in space and time, the
divisibility of matter, freedom of the will, and the
first cause of the world. He argues that contradic-
tions arise because we only ever have knowledge
of things which are conditioned (dependent), but
seek total explanations which require something
unconditioned (something which would not
need further explanation), and we assume that if
we are given something conditioned, the uncon-
ditioned will also be given (→ Dialectic).
Our empirical thinking seems both to
involve and not to involve the idea of the
unconditioned, leading us to contradictory
claims about the empirical world thought as
a totality. Kant argues that positing his pro-
posed distinction between things in them-
selves and appearances enables us to resolve
this contradiction: we have knowledge of
appearances only, which contain nothing
which is unconditioned. The idea that where
there are conditioned things there must be
something unconditioned appears to us only
as a principle of reason (→ regulative princi-
ples), but it is not in fact true of the spatio-
temporal world of which we have experience.
While we need to give the principle a role in
our thinking, we need not think that it is true
of the world we experience.
In addition to talking about things as they
appear to us and things as they are in them-
selves, Kant talks about phenomena and
noumena. Phenomena are objects which are
given to our senses and which have been
thought through the categories (→ deduction).
Noumena are objects which are known by a
pure intellect, without sense experience. Kant
explains his notion of things in themselves by
distinguishing between a positive and a nega-
tive sense of the term ‘noumenon’. The positive

notion of noumenon is the notion of a distinct
kind of object: one which is not spatio-tempo-
ral, and which does not affect our senses, but
rather would be known by the intellect alone.
Putative examples of such an object would be
God, Cartesian souls, Leibnizian monads, and,
perhaps, platonistically understood numbers.
Kant argues that we cannot have knowl-
edge of such objects, including knowledge
that there are any, and do not even really
understand what such objects would be. In
the negative sense, however, the notion of
noumena refers to the things of which we
have knowledge (through sense experience),
thought of in abstraction from what we
know about them through the senses. Kant
says that the notion of things as they are in
themselves should be understood in terms of
the notion of noumena in the negative sense.
Kant explicitly distances his position
from Berkeleian idealism, which he sees as
an example of the position he calls empiri-
cal idealism, which doubts the existence of
objects in space, or denies that we cognize
them immediately (A369; A491=B519). Kant
says that space and objects in space are ideal
in a transcendental sense, saying that space
‘is nothing as soon as we leave aside the con-
dition of the possibility of all experience, and
take it as something that grounds the things
in themselves’ (A28=B44). At the same time,
he insists that objects in space are real, and
that we have immediate experience of them,
as opposed to inferring their existence as the
causes of certain merely mental states. – LA
Further Reading
L. Allais, ‘Kant’s argument for transcendental
idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic’,
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
110,1 (2010): 47–75.
287
Key Themes and Topics
L. Allais, ‘Kant’s idealism and the secondary
quality analogy’, Journal of the History of
Philosophy 45,3 (2007): 459–484.
H. Allison, ‘Transcendental realism, empirical
realism and transcendental idealism’,
Kantian Review 11 (2006): 1–27.
D. Schulting, J. Verburgt (eds), Kant’s Idealism.
New Interpretations of a Controversial
Doctrine (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010).
Transcendental logic →
deduction, judgment
Transcendental reflection →
Amphiboly
Transcendental unity of self-
consciousness → apperception
Truth
According to the nominal definition of truth,
truth is ‘the agreement of cognition with its
object’ (A58=B82). The → object is the com-
mon ground of intersubjective agreement,
‘through which the truth of the judgment is
proved’ (A821=B849).
Despite the wealth of passages where Kant
equals truth to agreement with the object (e.g.
A237=B296; LL 219, 718, 823), there is some
controversy as to whether Kant really adheres
to a correspondence theory of truth, or if he
only refers to it in a preliminary fashion. It
might seem more plausible to construe Kant’s
view as a coherence theory of truth, since ide-
alism can be taken to hold that the objects
of cognition are subordinated to the subject
and therefore cannot serve as independent
truthmakers (→ transcendental idealism). But
this interpretation is based on too subjective
a construal of Kant’s idealism. Its empiri-
cal realism countenances objects with which
Key Themes and Topics
judgments can agree. The a priori determina-
tions of objects prescribed by the categories
and forms of → intuition are taken by Kant
to be conditions for the possibility of true
and false judgments about objects. In that
sense, the Transcendental Analytic is a ‘logic
of truth’ (A131=B170), making cognition of
objects possible. Coherence is a feature of the
systematicity of cognition (→ system) required
by → reason, rather than of truth as such.
A couple of qualifications are needed here,
however. First, agreement with the object does
not explain the truth of analytic judgments
(→ judgment). Such a judgment lacks a cor-
responding object, since its predicate merely
repeats marks contained in its subject con-
cept, and therefore amounts to a conceptual
analysis of the subject concept. Its truth can
be cognized through the law of contradiction
alone (A151=B190) (→ principle of (non-)
contradiction). The explanation of the truth
of an analytic judgment lies in its formality
(→ form). In addition to a synthetic judg-
ment’s material agreement with its object,
truth has a ‘formal aspect’ that ‘consists in
agreement with the laws of the understand-
ing’ (A294=B350). Although this can refer to
the principles of transcendental logic which
determine the form of an empirical object, it
also applies to general → logic, so that a state-
ment true merely in virtue of logic can be said
to agree with the formal conditions of thought
rather than to an object (cf. A59=B84).
Second, there are passages where Kant may
seem to cast doubt on the adequacy of the
received definition of truth (A57–60=B82–84;
JL 50–51). However, what is here in critical
focus is not correspondence, but the notion of a
general criterion of truth. Such a criterion would
be ‘valid of all cognitions without any distinc-
tion among their objects’ (A58=B83). But that
would amount to abstracting from all content
or relation to an object, and yet such content is
288
what truth consists in (according to the received
definition). It is in this sense, as a demand for a
general and sufficient criterion, that the question
‘What is truth?’ is absurd and leads to absurd
answers, a situation Kant compares to the sight
of ‘one person milking a billy-goat while the
other holds a sieve underneath’ (A58=B82–83).
From an ethical point of view, truthfulness
is ‘the greatest virtue in the world’ (LL 62).
Though one can be mistaken as to the truth of
what one says, ‘one can and must stand by the
truthfulness of one’s declaration or confession,
because one has immediate consciousness of
this’; for as regards what we hold as true, we do
not need to compare it with an object, but only
‘with the subject (before conscience)’ (MT 267).
Kant holds that truthfulness is a → duty, how-
ever great the disadvantage it may lead to (SRL
426); notoriously, this is a duty towards every-
one, even to a murderer at our door. – MQ
Further Reading
G. Prauss, ‘Zum Wahrheitsproblem bei
Kant’, in G. Prauss (ed.), Kant. Zur
Deutung seiner Theorie von Erkennen
und Handeln (Cologne: Kiepenheuer &
Witsch, 1973), pp. 73–89 [also in Kant-
Studien 60,2 (1969): 166–182].
A. Vanzo, ‘Kant on the nominal definition
of truth’, Kant-Studien 101,2 (2010):
147–166.
Unconditioned, the →
Antinomies, idea/ideas,
regulative principles
Understanding → judgment,
knowledge
Unity of consciousness →
apperception

Virtue, virtues
The Doctrine of Virtue is the second part of
Kant’s MM, that in which he treats the gen-
eral ethical, rather than political, require-
ments of → morality. There he defines virtue
as the strength with which one prioritizes
morally good reasons over other reasons,
and vice as the prioritizing of the latter rea-
sons when they conflict with the former.
Kant thus considers virtue and vice to
be matters of one’s reasoning, rather than
of one’s dispositions or habits of feeling or
understanding, and allows that one can be
neither virtuous nor vicious, if one prioritizes
moral reasons without the strength associated
with virtue.
He also claims that, since they concern rea-
sons and not only actions, virtues and vices
both leave some playroom in terms of precisely
which actions reflect them (cf. MM 379–380,
383–384, 389–390, 394–395, 399–410).
Kant proceeds to identify specific virtues
as specific morally good reasons and specific
vices as the reasons which oppose them, and
to divide virtues and vices into two kinds
according to the basic reasons, or ‘ends’, that
they concern. He argues in particular for a
range of virtues and vices concerning human
beings generally, irrespective of their more
specific circumstances.
Those concerned with ‘perfecting’ one’s
own agency prohibit suicide and self-harm,
erotic fantasizing, drunkenness and gluttony,
lying, avarice, and servility, and promote
the cultivation of one’s mental and physical
capacities and one’s performance of morally
good actions for morally good reasons. Kant
considers it a vice to be servile, for instance,
because moral reasons consider all affected
agents equally  – in his terms, they consider
all affected agents as ‘ends in themselves’ (→
289
Key Themes and Topics
kingdom of ends), rather than as valuable
only relative to inclinations that they might
be used as a ‘thing’ or ‘means’ to satisfy (MM
434–437).
The general virtues and vices concerned
with others’ happiness, on the other hand,
prohibit arrogance, defamation, and ridicule
and promote beneficence, gratitude and sym-
pathy. For example, Kant regards beneficence
as a virtue because moral reasons are those
for which one could want everyone to act in
similar circumstances, and considering others
only self-interestedly would conflict with one’s
own self-interest when one finds oneself in need
(MM 453).
He denies that virtues and vices can con-
cern other ends than one’s own perfection
and others’ happiness, since one inevitably
pursues one’s own happiness and others’
agency can be perfected only by themselves.
But he claims that more specific virtues and
vices can be derived by considering more
specific circumstances (MM 384–389,
468–469). – TB
Further Reading
L. Denis, ‘Kant’s conception of virtues’, in P.
Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion
to Kant and Modern Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), pp. 505–537.
L. Denis (ed.), Kant’s ‘Metaphysics of
Morals’: A Critical Guide (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010).
O. O’Neill, ‘Kant’s virtues’, in R. Crisp (ed.),
How Should One Live? Essays on the
Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996), pp. 77–97.
M. Timmons (ed.), Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals:
Interpretative Essays (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), chs 1 and 12–17.
Key Themes and Topics
Will (choice)
For Kant, the ‘will’ (Wille) is the ability to
act for reasons. He defines ‘life’, or ‘desire’,
as the ability to act intentionally, and ‘choice’
(Willkür) as this ability insofar as it is moti-
vated and aware of circumstances. The ‘will’,
then, is the particular kind of ‘choice’ that is
motivated by reasons.
Kant thus allows that choice need not
always be rational  – indeed, he considers
animals to choose without reasoning and
he admits that human reasoning can be
suspended, obstructed or distorted by feel-
ings. He also considers our reasoning, or
will, itself to be concerned in part with our
non-rational motivations, or inclinations.
Consequently, while he considers us able to
act for reasons and thus ‘free’ from determina-
tion by the non-rational, Kant describes rea-
sons as ‘imperatives’ or ‘constraints’ for us in
the sense that we do not necessarily obey them.
He claims that only a ‘holy’ will, one not sub-
ject to feelings and non-rational motivations,
would not regard reasons in this way (cf. G
412–414; CPrR 19–20, 32–33; MM 211–214,
222; and on the limits of human reasoning cf.
R 29n.; MM 407–408; Anthr 251–275).
A ‘good will’ for Kant is one that acts for rea-
sons of a specifically moral kind. Rather than
290
‘hypothetical’ reasons concerning how best
to pursue our non-rational motivations, these
reasons are ‘categorical’ (→ categorical impera-
tive) ones concerned with will itself, something
that Kant thinks motivates us simply as and
because we are wills. He therefore presents a
good will as one that acts for reasons which
concern what is good for willing as such  –
such as consent, skills, or what is included in a
rational sense of ‘happiness’ – and thus express
the will’s own ‘autonomy’, or ‘self-legislation’
(G 393–399, 414–445) (→ freedom).
In R he also argues that the ‘good’ or ‘evil’
(→ radical evil) character of a will must be
considered as a basic choice, underlying all
others, about whether to prioritize morally
good reasons over others (R 19–44). – TB
Further Reading
H. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), chs 5–8.
J. Timmermann, Kant’s Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007).
A. Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), chs 2 and 4.
 PART IV:
RECEPTION AND INFLUENCE
 5
RECEPTION AND INFLUENCE
This chapter presents a series of short essays
on the reception of Kant’s work, in particu-
lar his Inaugural Dissertation from 1770
and the first publication of the Critique
of Pure Reason in 1781, in the period
1770–1802. The main figures treated here
that were important for the development
and early reception of Kant’s philosophy
and that can be loosely grouped under the
often used historical label of post-Kantian-
ism – although most of them were certainly
not card-carrying Kantians  – are Lambert,
Schultz, Mendelssohn, Herz, Garve and
Feder, Hamann, Maimon, Jacobi, Reinhold,
Schulze, the early Schelling, Diez, Flatt,
Rapp, Fichte and the early Hegel. The
emphasis here is on these thinkers’ reception
of Kant’s work, not their own philosophies.
A second set of essays addresses the influ-
ence Kant’s thought exerted on later devel-
opments in philosophy in the second half of
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
in particular Schopenhauer, neo-Kantianism
and Heidegger’s influential phenomenological
reading. A final set of articles gives an overview
of mainstream contemporary Kantianism,
both in theoretical philosophy and ethics.
With each essay a list of further reading
is provided that will enable the reader to
undertake further research in a specific area
293
of scholarship on the reception and influence
of Kant’s thought. – DS
Until 1781: Responses to Kant’s
Inaugural Dissertation (1770)
In his treatise On the Form and Principles of
the Sensible and Intelligible World, known
as the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 (ID),
Kant claims that time and space are subjec-
tive forms, rooted in the nature of the human
mind rather than pertaining to things in
themselves, and that as a result our cogni-
tion of the sensible world is distinct in kind
from the cognition of the intelligible world.
Kant argues for the subjectivity of time and
space by showing that conceiving either as
an object or as a determination of an object,
whether an accident or relation, cannot
account for the character of the representa-
tion that we have of each.
With respect to time, for instance, Kant
argues that the idea we have of it could not
have been acquired through use of the senses
but is in fact presupposed in any such use.
So, against those, like Leibniz, who have
claimed that our ideas of succession arise
from our (confused) representation of the
Reception and Influence
series of actual things existing one after the
other, Kant claims that ‘I only understand the
meaning of the little word after by means
of the antecedent concept of time [. . .] [for]
those things come after one another which
exist at different times’ (ID 399).
In addition, Kant points out that our rep-
resentation of time is singular rather than
general, and that it cannot be analyzed into
characteristic marks, both of which imply
that the idea of time could not be a discursive
representation. Altogether, these features,
which also pertain to the representation of
space, imply that the ideas of time and space
could only be pure intuitions and from this
it is inferred that neither is something ‘objec-
tive and real’ but only ‘the subjective condi-
tion which is necessary, in virtue of the nature
of the human mind, for the co-ordinating of
all sensible things in accordance with a fixed
law’ (ID 400).
Given this, things in time and space are
to be regarded as phenomena, and their cog-
nition, even when it involves the use of the
understanding, is to be distinguished from the
cognition of noumena, or things considered
apart from these sensible forms. According
to Kant, it has been the failure to recognize
and enforce this distinction that has led to
persistent errors in metaphysics.
Kant rightly considered his account of the
status of time and space, his take on the dis-
tinction between phenomena and noumena,
and his diagnosis of the errors in metaphys-
ics to be original and important philosophi-
cal contributions. For this reason, he sent
his Dissertation to a number of prominent
intellectuals, including Johann Heinrich
Lambert (1728–1777), a scientist, math-
ematician, and philosopher; Johann Georg
Sulzer (1720–1779), known primarily for his
work in aesthetics; and Moses Mendelssohn
(1729–1786), the famous philosopher,
294
theologian, and literary critic. In addition, a
review of ID was published late in 1771 in
the Königsbergische gelehrte und politische
Zeitungen by Johann Schultz (1739–1805), a
court chaplain and professor of mathematics
in Königsberg.
As was to be expected, Kant’s arguments
for the status of time and space as pure
intuitions, and his conclusion that they are
not objective and real but merely subjective
forms, proved the most controversial. Kant’s
respondents raised a number of problems
with these claims, ranging from minor quib-
bles to serious challenges. Sulzer, for instance,
objected that time and space are ‘constructed
concepts’ in that they include the notion of
order and that it was duration and extension
that should be considered ‘absolutely simple
concepts’ (Corr-I 112), a point echoed by
Lambert (at least with regard to duration; cf.
Corr-I 108).
More substantively, Schultz objected to
Kant’s claim that space and time are only
forms of the sensible world, arguing that
from the fact that these are intuitions it does
not follow that they do not extend to intel-
lectual things. Indeed, Schultz contends that
there is good reason to think that space and
time are also forms of the intelligible world.
With respect to space, Schultz claims that
the intellectual concept of ‘subject’ as a mere
relation (to its accidents) or general notion
falls short of the complete concept of sub-
stance, which also includes the thought of
an absolutely singular existing thing, and for
which Schultz argues the intuition of the sub-
ject in space is required.1
As it relates to time, Schultz contends that
the subject’s persistence (a temporal predicate)
is required to conceive of the unchangeable
as well as the changeable: ‘every alteration
requires the persistence of the subject and a
succession of opposed states, and even for the

existence of the unalterable the persistence of
the subject is required, although without the
succession of opposed states.’2
Significantly, Schultz was not the only
critic to challenge Kant’s claim that time, as a
subjective form, does not apply to intelligible
objects as both Lambert and Mendelssohn
raise a similar objection in their comments
on ID. Both reject Kant’s case for the subjec-
tivity of time, arguing that while we might
deny the reality and objectivity of space, we
cannot possibly deny the reality and objec-
tivity of time since, at the very least, we can-
not deny that changes occur in the thinking
subject’s own representations. Lambert, who
was the first to respond with this criticism in
his letter of 13 October 1770, puts the objec-
tion in the following way:
The trouble seems to lie only in the
fact that one must simply think time
and duration and not define them.
All changes are bound to time and are
inconceivable without time. If changes
are real, then time is real, whatever it
may be. If time is unreal, then no change
can be real. I think, though, that even an
idealist must grant at least that changes
really exist and occur in his representa-
tions, for example, their beginning and
ending. Thus time cannot be regarded as
something unreal. (Corr-I 107)
Mendelssohn, in his response to Kant in a
letter of 25 December 1770, offers much the
same criticism but draws the key contrast
more sharply:
For several reasons I cannot convince
myself that time is something merely sub-
jective. Succession is to be sure at least
a necessary condition of the representa-
tions of finite minds. But finite minds are
not only subjects; they are also objects of
295
Reception and Influence
representations, both those of God and
those of their fellow minds. Consequently
succession is to be regarded as something
objective. (Corr-I 115; trans. amended)
As Mendelssohn counters, we might con-
vince ourselves that time is subjective if we
limited our consideration to the perspective
of the representing subject since, from that
perspective, there is no basis for determin-
ing whether the temporal order of our rep-
resentations is grounded in their objects or in
ourselves.
Nonetheless, the claim that time is subjec-
tive cannot be sustained when we consider
the representing subject as itself an object of
representation on the part of other minds.
This is because, considered from the per-
spective of such minds, including God’s, the
representing subject does not merely rep-
resent objects successively but is also itself
the subject of successive representations.
Accordingly, the representing subject must
be recognized as itself really changing with
respect to these representations and, there-
fore, time (as applying in this way to the sub-
ject) must be objective and real.
Given their illustrious sources, these
objections could not but be taken seriously
by Kant, and his first replies to his critics are
found in the well-known letter to Markus
Herz of 21 February 1772. Against Schultz’s
contention that space might equally be a con-
dition of the intelligible world, and as such
be objective, Kant explains that the complete
analysis of space yields no substances, nor
connections among those substances, that
might serve as a real ground for this repre-
sentation, and, therefore, that space could
not possibly be objective (Corr-I 133–134).
Concerning the objection raised by
Lambert, Mendelssohn and Schultz, Kant
confesses that it ‘has made me reflect
Reception and Influence
considerably’ (Corr-I 134) but argues that
its implausibility becomes evident once we
consider how it might be applied to objects
in space:
Why does one not accept the follow-
ing parallel argument? Bodies are real
(according to the testimony of outer
sense). Now, bodies are possible only
under the condition of space; therefore
space is something objective and real
that inheres in the things themselves. The
reason lies in the fact that it is obvious,
in regard to outer things, that one can-
not infer the reality of the object from
the reality of the representation, but in
the case of inner sense the thinking or
the existence of the thought and the
existence of my own self are one and the
same. (Corr-I 134)
Just as no one would accept that bodies are
real based solely on the testimony of outer
sense (and so that space, as the condition of
bodies, is also real), so we should not accept
that changes in the thinking subject are real
based solely on the testimony of inner sense
(and so that time, as the condition of such
changes, is also real). Accordingly, there is
no reason to think that because the think-
ing subject is represented as in time through
inner sense that it really is in time.
Whatever the merits of this particular line
of response, Kant evidently continued to
reflect on the objection as he would return
to it in CPR in the ‘Elucidation’ that follows
the discussion of time in the Transcendental
Aesthetic (A37=B53–54).
It bears noting that not all of the reac-
tion to Kant’s Dissertation was of a criti-
cal tenor. Herz himself, a former student of
Kant and the original respondent to ID, pub-
lished his Betrachtungen aus der speculativen
Weltweisheit in 1771, a text that amounts to
296
a commentary on Kant’s work, though one
that extends Kant’s analysis in significant
ways.
In particular, Herz contends that while
Kant denies space and time objective reality,
they are nonetheless not thereby reduced to
wholly ideal entities but must be accorded at
least a reality in the subject. Herz argues that
the objective reality of a relation, as involv-
ing a comparison of two things, has to have
its ground either in one of the things that are
being compared or in both taken together.
But Herz rules each of these options out,
concluding instead that ‘with all relations
some subject must be presupposed which
compares these objects with one another
and, from the differences it perceives in the
effects of both, brings forth a simple result
[i.e. the relation]’.3
Interestingly, Herz proceeds to use this as a
basis for demonstrating the simplicity of the
thinking subject that is thereby presupposed.
As he argues, the thinking subject could not
consist in a number of parts, because if it did
then the representations that are compared in
the relation would be distributed among the
parts and we would have to posit a further
subject in order to institute the comparison
that results in the relation. While the posit of
this subject might be postponed for as long
as one wishes, in the end one will require ‘a
simple being [. . .] which is in the position
of representing to itself various objects at
the same time and bringing forth from their
comparison a single result’.4
Kant praised Herz’s text as a ‘discerning
and deeply thoughtful little book’ (Corr-I
132), and it is certainly possible that its
claims about the nature and centrality of
the thinking subject exercised an important
influence on the direction of Kant’s thought
in the 1770s, the so-called silent decade at
the end of which Kant published CPR. – CD

Further Reading
L. Falkenstein, ‘Kant, Mendelssohn,
Lambert and the subjectivity of time’,
Journal of the History of Philosophy 21
(1991): 227–251.
H. Klemme, ‘Kants Wende zum Ich’,
Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung
53 (1999): 509–529.
A. Laywine, ‘Kant on sensibility and the
understanding in the 1770s’, Canadian
Journal of Philosophy 33,4 (2003):
443–482.
A. Laywine, ‘Kant’s laboratory of ideas in
the 1770s’, in G. Bird (ed.), A Companion
to Kant (Malden, MA/Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010), pp. 63–78.
First Responses to the
Critique of Pure Reason:
the 1780s and later
The Garve-Feder review
Kant often expressed dissatisfaction about
the reception of the Critical philoso-
phy. Certainly, things did not begin well.
The first published review of CPR, which
appeared anonymously in the Zugabe zu
den Göttingschen Anzeigen von gelehrten
Sachen in 1782, inspired bitter polemics in
P, which Kant published in 1783, exposing
the reviewer’s failure to understand CPR and
challenging him ‘to emerge from being incog-
nito’ (P 379).
Kant’s challenge initiated correspondence
with Christian Garve (1742–1798). Garve
confessed to reviewing CPR for the Göttingen
journal, yet disowns the review published
therein (Corr-I 328). For Garve’s submission
was substantially rewritten by Johann Georg
297
Reception and Influence
Heinrich Feder (1740–1821)  – who bears
responsibility for ‘the breath of pure ani-
mosity’ and ‘incoherence’ of the Göttingen
review (respectively Corr-I 329–330 and
337). Nevertheless, when Garve’s original
manuscript later appeared in the Allgemeine
deutsche Bibliothek, evidence suggests that
Kant was no more impressed with it.5
Garve misreads Kant’s ‘appearances’ as
synonymous with Hume’s ‘impressions’, and
thus misinterprets Kant as claiming that space
and time are ‘forms of sensation’,6 and that
the delimitation of reason’s cognition-geared
application excludes, not only cognition of
supersensible entities, but also cognition of
any self-subsistent object over and above our
impressions.7 Garve therefore misinterprets
CPR as attempting to solve ‘the mystery’
concerning how ‘in the face of the total dis-
similarity of representations and objects (if
the later exist), the former still lead to the lat-
ter and seem to afford knowledge of them’.8
Garve’s original manuscript thus suffers from
four of the faults for which Kant castigates
the Göttingen review in P, namely:
(1) Failing to recognize that CPR aimed
at answering the question concerning the
possibility of metaphysics (P 372–373); (2)
failing to appreciate the question concerning
the possibility of synthetic cognition a priori
(P 377); (3) failing to appreciate the role of
transcendental idealism (P 375–377); and (4)
unjustifiably accusing CPR of providing no
‘sure criterion for distinguishing truth from
illusion in experience’ (P 375).9
However, while Garve misread Kant as a
Humean, Feder misread him as a Berkeleyan.
Feder’s interpolations thus draw analo-
gies between transcendental idealism and
Berkeleyan phenomenalism, and yet, in
nonetheless recognizing that the former
‘encompasses spirit and matter in the same
manner’, describes it as a ‘higher idealism’
Reception and Influence
that ‘transforms the world and ourselves into
representations’.10
We can therefore understand why Garve
was embarrassed by the ‘incoherence’ of the
Göttingen review. For it ended up as, not only
a misguided, but also an inconsistent polemic,
sometimes misreading Kant as a Humean for
whom objects outside our impressions are
rationally indemonstrable, while also accus-
ing Kant of the Berkeleyan claim that objects
outside our impressions are impossible.
Kant explicitly responds to Feder’s charges
of Berkeleyanism in P,11 but does not similarly
respond to Garve’s Humean misreadings.
Yet, perhaps Kant’s many claims throughout
P concerning how ‘criticism’ is intended as a
‘solution’ to Humean scepticism (which are
almost entirely absent from the first edition
of CPR12) constitute such a response.
These claims set the agenda for CPR’s
reception within the decade to come. In those
years, Kant’s defenders as much as his oppo-
nents questioned the extent to which he suc-
ceeded in silencing the sceptic, often arguing
that radical reconfigurations of Kantian doc-
trine are required for the critical philosophy
to achieve this – reconfigurations which led
to the emergence of German Idealism in the
1790s.
Investigations into the ‘Common Root’:
Hamann, Reinhold and Maimon
While the Göttingen review was the first
published review of CPR, it was not the first
review ever composed. The first review was
completed on 1 July 1781 (just six weeks
after publication of CPR) by Johann Georg
Hamann (1730–1788). Hamann developed
his criticisms of Kant in order to com-
plete, in 1784, a text entitled Metakritik
über den Purismum der reinen Venunft,
which, in being circulated among leading
298
thinkers, exerted a ‘considerable subterra-
nean influence’.13
Hamann’s focus upon later sections of
CPR, in particular ‘The Discipline of Pure
Reason’, means that, even in 1781, he rec-
ognizes that Kant attempts some kind of
‘answer’ to Hume by forging a ‘middle path’
between dogmatism and scepticism.14 As a
self-confessed Humean, however, Hamann
remains unimpressed, and claims that Kant
unduly sides with dogmatism by insisting
upon the autonomy of reason. Hamann thus
refers to Kant’s suggestion that ‘sensibility
and understanding [. . .] spring from a com-
mon, but to us unknown, root’ (A15=B29)
to make the Humean claim that an investi-
gation into this ‘common root’ would reveal
that impressions constitute the ‘transcen-
dental root’ from which all concepts are
abstracted.15
Likewise, in the Metakritik, he appeals
to Hume’s Berkeleyan argument that, con-
tra Locke, ‘all general ideas are nothing but
particular ones, annexed to a certain term,
which gives them a more extensive signi-
fication’16 to dismiss Kant’s claim to a fac-
ulty of a priori concepts. Kant’s claim is the
product of a ‘purification’ which erroneously
interprets reason as independent of (1) ‘all
tradition and custom and belief in them’,
(2)  ‘experience and its everyday induction’
and (3) ‘language’.17
In regard to the latter, Hamann suggests
that, had Kant attended to how ‘the entire
faculty of thought [is] founded on lan-
guage’18 and thus how all thought depends
upon the ‘visible and audible’,19 he would
have realized that our intellectual faculties
are rooted in the sensible. Hamann thus dis-
misses Kant’s enquiry into ‘the possibility of
the human cognition of objects of experience
without and before any experience and [. . .]
the possibility of a sensible intuition before

any sensation of an object’ as an enquiry into
a ‘double im-possibility’.20
Hamann’s review was published twenty
years later in the Beyträge zur leichtern
Uebersicht des Zustandes der Philosophie
by Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823),21
who, in the late 1780s, attained fame by also
investigating the ‘common root’ of our cog-
nitive faculties. Far from intending to sup-
port Hume’s position, however, Reinhold
hoped to inoculate the results of Kant’s criti-
cal philosophy from the Humean sceptic – or,
indeed, the objections of anyone of opposed
philosophical persuasions.
Reinhold believed that this could be
achieved by means of a foundationalist
reconfiguration of the critical philosophy,
and he believed that this was required inso-
far as the results of CPR were founded upon
controversial presuppositions which it lacked
the resources to make universally accepted.
Reinhold called this investigation the
Elementarphilosophie, which he defined as
‘the science of the entire faculty of represen-
tation as such’.22 It provides an investiga-
tion into the ‘common root’ of our faculties
insofar as it concerns ‘the representations
of sensibility, understanding and reason
[.  .  .] simply qua representations’,23 i.e. that
which is ‘common’ to every conscious state
and conscious datum.24 The first, that is,
foundational, principle of this science  – the
‘principle of consciousness’ – is thus drawn
from the ‘fact’ of ‘consciousness as such’ or
‘mere representation’ and asserts that ‘in
consciousness representation is distinguished
through the subject from object and subject
and is referred to both’.25
As the ultimate explanatory ground of all
knowledge, this principle is ‘self-determined’
and ‘self-explanatory’26 and, insofar as it
expresses nothing but the ‘fact of conscious-
ness’ of which everyone is immediately certain,
299
Reception and Influence
it is universally binding (allgemeingeltend),27
since anyone who understands it must rec-
ognize its indubitable truth. Reinhold thus
endeavours to derive Kant’s many presup-
positions from this principle in the hope of
raising the results of the critical philosophy
beyond all possible doubt.28
As Reinhold promulgated the
Elementarphilosophie, another investiga-
tion into the ‘common root’ was conducted
by Salomon Maimon (1753–1800) in his
Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie
(1790). There, Maimon characterizes him-
self as an ‘empirical sceptic’ and a ‘rational
dogmatist’.29 He is an ‘empirical sceptic’ inso-
far as, like Hume, he doubts whether natu-
ral science contains any a priori principles,
while he is a ‘rationalist dogmatist’ insofar
as he believes that, to explain the possibility
of mathematical cognition, transcendental
philosophy must appeal to the resources of
Kant’s rationalist predecessors.
The question concerning mathematical
cognition demands a better explanation of
how the (apparently) heterogeneous facul-
ties of sensibility and understanding interact
than that provided by Kant. Maimon thus
advocates re-appropriating the Leibnizian
conception of space and time, which, qua
forms of intuition, he declares to be confused
representations produced by the imagina-
tion of beings endowed with merely ‘finite
understanding’.
However, for an ‘infinite understand-
ing’  – of which our understanding is a
limitation30  – space and time are originally
concepts of the objective difference of things,
which it simultaneously thinks and produces.
Understanding thus constitutes the ‘common
root’ of our cognitive faculties; sensibility
merely providing confused representations of
concepts of objects of thought and thought
relations.
Reception and Influence
Are There any a Priori Synthetic Truths?
Maimon’s Humean Doubts
In P, Kant reproached the Göttingen review
for not appreciating the question concern-
ing synthetic cognition a priori; one had to
appreciate that question, Kant implied, to
understand why he embraced transcenden-
tal idealism. Nonetheless, it was soon recog-
nized that, in this regard, Kant simply begged
the question against the Humean sceptic. For
Kant simply presupposed that we possess
synthetic cognition a priori, and thus had lit-
tle to say to a Humean, who, in holding all a
priori truths to be analytic and all synthetic
truths to be a posteriori, was under no obli-
gation to accept any of the results of Kant’s
investigation into the possibility of synthetic
cognition a priori.
A case in point is mathematical cognition:
Kant presupposed that this is a priori syn-
thetic and failed to justify the validity of this
presupposition to the bulk of his initial read-
ership who, under the influence of Hume
or Leibniz, were convinced it was analytic.
Likewise, he had little to say to those who
denied the apriority of mathematical truths,
such as the ‘many mathematicians’ who, at
the time, considered them as ‘hypothetical’.31
This worried Reinhold, who maintains that
CPR lacks resources to convince the Humean
or Leibnizian that mathematical judgments
are not analytic, since Kant derived the dis-
tinction between intuition and concept, req-
uisite for any such argument, from the very
assumption that mathematical judgments are
a priori synthetic.32
Just such a problem, for Reinhold, jus-
tifies his Elementarphilosophie. For the
Elementarphilosophie endeavours to prove
that mathematical judgments are a priori
synthetic from the distinction between intui-
tion and concept, and proves the distinction
300
between intuition and concept from the prin-
ciple of consciousness. As Reinhold believes
that Humeans and Leibnizians must accept
the principle of consciousness, he hopes that,
by its means, he can convince them of the
synthetic apriority of mathematical truths.
Reinhold’s foundationalism failed to con-
vince Maimon, however, who allied him-
self with Hume and Leibniz in maintaining
that all a priori cognition is derived from
the principle of non-contradiction. Maimon
admits that for a ‘finite understanding’ such
judgments may appear synthetic, but insists
that for the ‘infinite understanding’ they are
analytic.
He claims that we only believe math-
ematical judgments to be synthetic insofar as
their subject is either ‘badly defined’ or ‘not
defined at all’ and says that demonstrating
that they are analytic would be a not impos-
sible, albeit laborious, task.33 He also denies
that natural science contains any synthetic
cognition a priori to follow Hume in claim-
ing that all its truths are a posteriori.
Indeed, in his Versuch einer neuen Logik
oder Theorie des Denkens he castigates Kant
for lumping together two very dissimilar
questions, i.e. the questions concerning the
possibility of (1) pure mathematics and (2)
a (supposed) physica pura, under the rubric
of the question concerning a priori synthetic
judgments, as if they possessed an essential
similarity.34
For Maimon these questions are very dif-
ferent since (1) in referring to determinate
objects mathematical judgments can be
illustrated ‘through construction’ (e.g. every
straight line is the shortest because, in being
constructed, every straight line must acquire
the predicate of being the shortest), whereas
(2) the judgments of a (supposed) physica
pura never refer to determinate objects and
cannot be illustrated through construction.35

Maimon thus argues that even if the causal
law is an a priori principle applicable to
objects of experience in general, it does not
legitimate cognition of necessary connections
between determinate objects, and the most
coherent explanation of ‘synthetic judgments
that refer to determinate objects of actual
experience’36 is that provided by Hume.
However, that Hume’s position can also
explain judgments concerning objects of
experience in general leads Maimon to con-
clude his Versuch einer neuen Logik with the
claim that ‘in my opinion [. . .] the catego-
ries are designed not for empirical employ-
ment, but only for the employment in the
determination a priori of the objects of
mathematics’.37
Maimon on the Quid Facti and
the Quid Juris
Maimon expressed doubts about whether we
employ a priori concepts to cognize objects
of experience when he writes to Kant con-
cerning ‘the question quid facti?’ that ‘[y]ou
seem to have touched on this, but it is, I think,
important to answer it fully, on account of
the Humean skepticism’ (Corr-II 17). Kant
described the question quid facti – with refer-
ence to Locke’s Essay – as demanding physi-
ological explanation of our ‘possession of
pure knowledge’ (A87=B119) to distinguish
it from the Transcendental Deduction’s quid
juris question, which demands explana-
tion of how a priori concepts are applicable
within experience.
Maimon grants the former question more
significance, since he recognizes that, in focus-
ing upon how pure knowledge of experience
is possible, Kant does not answer Hume’s
doubts concerning such pure knowledge.
Kant may have attempted to answer Hume
in the Second Analogy with his argument
301
Reception and Influence
that our ability to distinguish an objective
succession of appearances from a subjective
succession of apprehended perceptions is the
product of a cognition of necessary connec-
tion enabled by the category of causality, but
Maimon questions this account for the fol-
lowing reasons:
(1) He denies that we possess any sure
criterion for distinguishing an objective suc-
cession of appearances from a subjective suc-
cession of perceptions. For if we compare a
supposedly objective succession of b follow-
ing a with a subjective succession of c fol-
lowing a we find that in themselves these
successions are indistinguishable. We might
believe that the succession of a to b is objec-
tive because of its irreversibility, but this does
not provide an adequate criterion for distin-
guishing it from a to c, since, when I appre-
hend c following a, it is just as impossible
that I could at the same time apprehend a
following c as it is that I could apprehend a
following b.38
(2) He maintains that our commonsensi-
cal pretension to distinguish necessarily con-
nected events from contingent sequences of
perceptions can be based, as Hume main-
tained, only on experience. E.g. ‘the stove in
the room has been lit and then we notice that
outside snow has fallen’39. Common sense
maintains that the warming of the air and the
snowfall are objectively real events, so why
do we believe that the former illustrates nec-
essary connection while the latter does not?
For Maimon this can only be based upon
past experience, as Hume claimed.
(3) If we have no criterion to distinguish
an objective succession of appearances from
a subjective succession of perceptions other
than fallible inductive inferences from past
experience, the possibility that we possess
nothing but subjective successions of percep-
tions cannot be ruled out.40 Garve’s objection
Reception and Influence
that CPR does not provide a sure criterion
for distinguishing truth from illusion (see
above), cannot therefore, albeit for different
reasons, be ruled out decisively.
The Versuch über die
Transzendentalphilosophie, despite doubting
the fact of experience (in the Kantian sense), still
maintains that Kant’s categories possess objec-
tive validity as ‘conditions of perception’.41
There, for example, Maimon argues that
the category of causality has objective valid-
ity as a condition of possibility of alteration,
and is therefore a condition of possibility of
even subjective sequences of perceptions.42
Transcendental philosophy must explain this
objective validity by demonstrating how cat-
egories are valid of empirical intuition, i.e. by
answering the quid juris question.
Nevertheless, Maimon’s transcendental
philosophy rules out transcendental argu-
ments concerning the possibility of experience
(since he doubts that we possess ‘experiential
propositions’), to focus upon transcendental
arguments concerning the possibility of ‘math-
ematical propositions’.43 Maimon thus refers
to himself within a letter to Kant as enlarging
the scope of the quid juris question. For Kant,
the quid juris concerned the application of a
priori categories to a posteriori intuitions; and
the connection between the categories and a
priori intuitions established within mathemati-
cal propositions was seen by Kant as a resource
for the solution to the former problem rather
than as generating another problem.
Maimon however objects that ‘even if they
are a priori, intuitions are still heterogeneous
with concepts of understanding’44 to con-
clude that the quid juris must be extended to
the categories’ application to a priori intui-
tion. The solution to this problem provides
resources for the further problem concern-
ing the categories’ application to a posteriori
intuitions.
302
For Maimon, the forms of intuition and
categories are not fundamentally heterogene-
ous, since the former are originally concepts.
He thus claims that in thinking forms of intu-
ition we do not apply the categories directly
to them, but rather think the relations of
things in general which would be thought by
an infinite understanding. What, however, are
those ‘things’, the concepts of their relations
of which constitute the objective ground of
intuitions of space and time? Maimon here
refers to ‘ideas of the understanding’ which,
in a letter to Kant (Corr-II 16), he claimed to
have introduced to answer the quid juris.
He insists that the diversity of empirical
intuition compels us to assume a correspond-
ing diversity among its objective grounds and
declares that the objective grounds of both
the matter and form of intuitions are immi-
nently contained within them as elements
from which they are composed. These ele-
ments are ‘ideas of understanding’ since we
can never be conscious of them insofar as
consciousness presupposes their synthesis.45
As elements of synthesis they complement
the ‘idea of reason’, i.e. the idea of a ‘complete
synthesis’, which, for Maimon, is the idea of
an infinite understanding. They are ‘useful for
resolving the question quid juris?’46 because
they enable Maimon to explain the applica-
tion of the categories to empirical intuitions
by appeal to our participation within the
infinite understanding’s conceptual grasp of
the things which it produces.47 Only in this
way, Maimon believes, does the quid juris
attain a satisfactory answer.48
The Problematic Status of Things
in Themselves: Jacobi’s and Schulze’s
Critique of Kant’s Idealism
Maimon’s description of the ‘ideas of under-
standing’ as noumena and the perceptible

objects compounded from them as phenom-
ena shows how he avoids the claim that the
material content of intuitions is ‘given’ by
things in themselves.49 He thus obviates the
(supposed) contradictions in Kant’s account
of the ground of the material content of intu-
ition, which were highlighted by Friedrich
Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819) in his David
Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus
und Realismus, published in 1787.
Jacobi takes up Kant’s claim that the mate-
rial content of intuition is received by our
passive faculty of sensibility to ask about the
‘objects’ producing these sensations. These
cannot be empirical objects, Jacobi concludes,
since, for Kant, they are merely the product
of a synthesis of the manifold.50 They must
therefore be things in themselves; and since
‘the word sensibility [. . .] would be meaning-
less [. . .] if the concepts [. . .] of causality and
dependence were not already contained in
the concept of it as real and objective deter-
minations’51 it follows, according to Jacobi,
that Kant presupposes that the material con-
tent of intuition is ‘given’ through the causal
affection of things in themselves.
As Jacobi observes, however, such a pre-
supposition contradicts the critical phi-
losophy’s conclusion that we possess no
knowledge of things in themselves, neither
regarding whether they conform to the
principle of sufficient reason, nor whether
they even exist.52 He thus concludes that
‘without that presupposition I could not
enter into the system, but with it I could
not stay within it’,53 for it is impossible ‘to
reconcile the presupposition of objects that
produce impressions on our senses [. .  .]
with a hypothesis intent on abolishing all
grounds by which the presupposition could
be supported’.54
Five years later, similar claims were made
by the Humean Gottlob Ernst Schulze
303
Reception and Influence
(1761–1833) in his anonymously published
sceptical attack on the critical philosophy,
Aenesidemus oder über die Fundamente der
von dem Herrn Professor Reinhold in Jena
gelieferten Elementar-Philosophie: Nebst
einer Verteidigung des Skeptizismus gegen
die Anmaßungen der Vernunftkritik.
Schulze accuses Kant’s claims that we are
affected by things in themselves of begging
the question against Hume’s claim that such
affection is rationally indemonstrable.55 In
this regard, Schulze contends, Kant proceeds
just like a rationalist metaphysician in tacitly
accepting an isomorphism between thought
and being to infer from our propensity to
think of many representations as the product
of things in themselves the conclusion that
they do indeed have such an origin.
Yet, for Schulze, Kant is more objectionable
than a rationalist metaphysician because of
the prima facie contradiction between (1) his
presupposition that the affection of things
in themselves occasions empirical intuitions,
and (2) his argument that the categories of
actuality and causality are only applicable to
those very intuitions.56
The Incoherence of Formalism
Kant’s failure to establish the existence of
things in themselves provokes Schulze to
restate Garve’s objection that CPR does
not provide a sure criterion for distinguish-
ing truth from illusion in experience.57 This
objection demonstrates how Schulze, like
Garve, misreads Kant’s ‘appearances’ as
referring to congeries of sensations struc-
tured by the mind, so that the reality of cog-
nition of experience is only secured insofar
as they correspond with things in themselves.
Schulze thus misinterprets Kant as a rep-
resentationalist still committed to a corre-
spondence theory of truth.
Reception and Influence
As such, one of his final criticisms of the
doctrine of things in themselves concerns
how any correspondence between them
and their appearances is even conceivable.
Schulze writes:
to be [. . .] convinced of the fact that,
according to the principles of the critical
philosophy, cognition of empirical sensa-
tion [. . .] may not possess an actual rela-
tion to things outside us [. . .] one need
only, after having dissolved the represen-
tation of a sensible object into the marks
from which it is constituted, abstract
those which, according to the critical
philosophy, belong merely to the form of
cognition [. . .]. How much remains after
abstraction of all these forms [.  .  .] as
matter for cognition? It might be noth-
ing. Therefore according to the most
recent dogmatic system [i.e. the critical
philosophy] [. . .] the representation of
an empirical object is [. . .] compounded
from forms of cognition; it could thus
appropriately be called formalism [. .  .]
to indicate its differences from other
dogmatic systems.58
Towards German Idealism: Schelling’s
Reaction in the 1790s
The influence of the Humean sceptics’
reception of Kant is well illustrated by the
Allgemeine Uebersicht der neuesten philoso-
phischen Litteratur that Friedrich Wilhelm
Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) wrote for the
Philosophisches Journal einer Gesellschaft
Teutscher Gelehrten. There, Schelling (1)
highlights misinterpretations of Kant that
should be avoided and (2) draws upon some
of Kant’s early critics to offer an interpreta-
tion of ‘what [Kant] had to have intended
if his philosophy was to prove internally
cohesive’.59 In so doing, Schelling points
304
towards directions pursued by himself and
other German Idealists.
Schelling borrows Schulze’s term ‘for-
malism’60 to disparage the position of those
who – according to Schelling – misread Kant
as claiming that ‘the form of our cognitions
originate within ourselves whereas their mat-
ter is given to us from the outside’.61 Such
misreadings, Schelling observes, are respon-
sible for the assumption that Kant accounts
for the material content of empirical intui-
tion as the product of the affection of things
in themselves, which, as Jacobi and Schulze
pointed out, contradicts his critical restric-
tion of the categories of actuality and causal-
ity to appearances.
Like Maimon, Schelling attempts to free
Kant from this contradiction by denying
that he ever appealed to things in them-
selves to explain the origins of experience.62
According to Schelling, Kant could have in
no way intended that things in themselves
possess such a role, first, because CPR main-
tains that ‘everything that is for us an object
or thing has become object etc. only within
an original synthesis of intuition’63; and sec-
ondly because that would reduce Kant to
being an inconsistent Humean. In regard
to the latter, Schelling remarks how for the
‘Formalists’
the world bears no affinity to our spirit
[Geiste] other than that of a contingent
affect. Nevertheless such a world [. . .]
they claim to govern with laws that [. . .]
have been implanted in the understand-
ing. As the supreme legislators of nature
[and] with the full consciousness that the
world is comprised of things in them-
selves, they impose these concepts and
laws of the understanding onto these
things in themselves [. . .] and this world
of eternal and determinate nature obeys
their speculative decree. [. . .] Hume, the

sceptic, first had claimed what is now
being attributed to Kant.
Yet Hume readily admitted that all our
natural sciences amount to deception,
[and] that all laws of nature constitute
but a routine of our imagination. This
was consistent philosophy. And Kant is
supposed to have done no more than
repeat Hume so as to now render him,
who had been consistent, inconsistent.64
Schelling’s ‘non-formalist’ interpretation of
Kant draws upon many of Maimon’s sug-
gestions for how transcendental philosophy
should be reconfigured. Just as Maimon
accused Kant of promulgating an ‘indolent
philosophy’ with respect to time and space,
insofar as he simply presupposed that they
are ‘original forms’ without investigating
whether they might originate within some
prior ground,65 so Schelling denies that we
‘simply bring along [the forms of space and
time] as something finished and ready-made
for the purpose of intuition’.66
For Schelling, investigation into the prior
ground of these forms of intuition provides – just
as it did for Maimon – ‘a hint [regarding] the most
complete account of the essence of intuition (of
its material)’,67 which can explain the material
content of empirical intuition without recourse
to ‘that fantasy of the brain [Hirngespinnst] that
has tormented our philosophers for so long  –
viz. the things in themselves’.68
Furthermore, to obviate the objection that
critical idealism is an inconsistent Humeanism,
Schelling follows Maimon’s rationalist dogma-
tism in denying the absolute heterogeneity of
the form and matter of empirical intuitions to
argue that both arise inseparably united as a
result of the ‘self-intuition of a spirit [Geistes]’
or ‘absolute subject’,69 which  – akin to the
relationship between Maimon’s infinite under-
standing and our own understanding –‘contains
305
Reception and Influence
the essence of an individual nature (of selfhood
[Ichheit])’.70 – RF
Further Reading
F. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German
Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
E. Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of
Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012).
M. Frank, ‘Unendliche Annäherung’: Die
Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik
(Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1997).
P. Franks, All or Nothing. Systematicity,
Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism
in German Idealism (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2005).
R.-P. Horstmann, Die Grenzen der Vernunft.
Eine Untersuchung zu Zielen und
Motiven des Deutschen Idealismus, third
edition (Frankfurt a/M: Klostermann,
2004), esp. pt. II: ‘Vom Buchstaben zum
Geist. Die Rezeption der Kantischen
Philosophie durch F. H. Jacobi und die
Deutsche Idealisten’.
M. Kuehn, ‘Kant’s Critical philosophy and
its reception – the first five years (1781–
1786)’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Kant and Modern
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), pp. 630–663.
Kantianism in the 1790s: From
Reinhold to Hegel
Reinhold’s major impetus
It would appear beyond doubt that the Critical
philosophy of Immanuel Kant is, in general, of
great importance to the philosophical devel-
opment of German Idealism. Historically,
Reception and Influence
however, its importance to post-Kantian phi-
losophy is often overstated. One must keep
in mind, for example, that until 1790 only a
handful of books on the Critical philosophy
had appeared, most of them also critical of it.
In institutional terms, though, among
the first attempts to establish Kantian phi-
losophy academically, in the mid-1780s the
University of Jena made the Critical phi-
losophy compulsory for students in the fac-
ulty of philosophy.71 Due to this curricular
reform and the subsequent appointments of
Karl Leonhard Reinhold and Johann Gottlob
Fichte, the Salana soon became one of the
leading German universities.
The main figure behind this reform was
Christian Gottfried Schütz, who was the
founder of the most successful journal of this
period, the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung,
which was also committed to the general
propagation of Kantian philosophy. However,
after the publication of CPR, it took more
than four years until in July/August 1785
a first positive assessment of Kantian phi-
losophy appeared. The lengthy review in
the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung was based
largely on the at that time only obtainable
exposition of CPR, the Erläuterungen über
des Herrn Professor Kant Critik der reinen
Vernunft (1784), written by the court chap-
lain of Königsberg, Johann Schul[t]z.
For the earliest reception of the Critical
philosophy this book proved far more impor-
tant than CPR itself. Virtually all classical
German writers and philosophers from the
beginning got acquainted with the key issues
of CPR through reading this book, with the
noticeable exception of Fichte.
Fichte was one of the very few who, in
1790, studied the Critiques firsthand and
also understood their content and intention
more or less in its literal sense. In 1792, he
got acquainted with Reinhold’s foundational
306
philosophical programme, which was the ini-
tial motivation behind his own foundational
philosophy of the Grundlage der gesamten
Wissenschaftslehre (1794). Fichte’s adapta-
tion of Kantian philosophy is virtually the
inverse of its adaptation by the students in
the Tübinger Stift (most famously, Hölderlin,
Hegel, and Schelling). Initially, they in fact
do not deal with Kant’s critical philosophy
directly, but as mediated by the aforemen-
tioned interpretive work of Schulz and the
writings of Reinhold.
Reinhold was one of the very first who, in
the second half of the 1780s, adopted the phi-
losophy of Kant. His interest was aroused by
the aforementioned review in the Allgemeine
Literatur-Zeitung. One year after this review
had been published, Reinhold’s first two of
in all eight ‘Letters on the Kantian philoso-
phy’ appeared between August 1786 and
September 1787 in the Teutsche Merkur.
Journalistically, these ‘Letters’ proved a huge
success. It is no exaggeration to say that it is
thanks to them that the Kantian philosophy
was put on the philosophical agenda.
Reinhold’s ‘Letters’, however, are anything
but a concise exploration of the more techni-
cal tenets of the Critical philosophy. Rather,
they deal very broadly with the more general
question of its usefulness (Nutzen). It is by
virtue of this question that Reinhold made
the extremely difficult insights of the Critical
philosophy accessible for the learned audi-
ence of his time. Due to its specific orienta-
tion, but also due to the fact that CPR itself
plays a relatively minor role in the ‘Letters’,
from the very beginning the debate around
the Critical philosophy followed a pattern
that was more in line with the interests of
Reinhold himself rather than those of the
Critical philosophy strictly speaking.
In an engaging way, Reinhold summarized
the results of the Critical philosophy and fitted

them in with the programme that he himself
had pursued since his time in Vienna.72 It has
often been claimed that Reinhold only popu-
larized Kant’s thought, which consequently
led to the general ­disregard of his own
­philosophy. Such views, however, fail to do
justice to Reinhold’s historical importance.
According to Reinhold, the chief merit of
the Critical philosophy is that it frees us from
blind faith and false religious beliefs, and that
it thus paves the way towards an enlightened
society. The Kantian philosophy purifies the
Christian religion that had been corrupted
by self-opinionated dogmatism and the self-
serving clergy. Reinhold’s main point in this
regard is that philosophy, by means of a
critical approach to reason, is able to achieve
what Christianity originally had brought into
the world by means of the heart.
This was, of course, not the intention
behind Kant’s own philosophical pro-
gramme. Nevertheless, just a cursory look
at Hegel’s early philosophy shows that
Reinhold propounded philosophical ideas
that could not but wake the young students
of the Stift ‘from their dogmatic slumber’. In
Reinhold’s view, Critical philosophy was to
be seen as paving the way for a new religion,
which was propagated some years later in
the so-called Älteste Systemprogramm des
deutschen Idealismus.
Pivotal Minor Figures: Diez, Flatt, Rapp
The importance of Reinhold’s philoso-
phy for understanding the development of
Kantian philosophy cannot be underesti-
mated. One of the early leading Kantians in
the Stift, Immanuel Carl Diez (1766–1796),
writes in regard to Reinhold’s second main
work, his Versuch einer neuen Theorie
des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens
(1789),73 that it was through this book that
307
Reception and Influence
he became familiar with CPR.74 From Diez’
correspondence we may conclude that he
also discussed Reinhold’s ‘Letters’ with his
fellow students.
Another important source for the recep-
tion of Kantian philosophy in the Stift are
the lectures of the philosophy professor
Johann Friedrich Flatt (1759–1821). In a
lecture most probably attended by Hegel
and Hölderlin he offers a concise guideline
for studying Kant. Flatt repeatedly recom-
mends Schulz’ Erläuterungen and Reinhold’s
‘Letters’, while Reinhold’s Versuch he only
recommends with reservations.
Flatt’s main criticism is directed against
Reinhold’s attempt in the Versuch to provide
a foundation for the results of CPR. Virtually
all students, however, rejected Reinhold’s
foundationalism (Grundsatzphilosophie) as
well as Fichte’s more substantial attempt at
providing such a foundation. In this respect
it is significant that Hegel approached the
early discussions on this subject matter with
indifference.75
It is noticeable that, towards the end of
1790, two factions of Kantians came to the
fore in the Stift. The one faction leans heavily
on Reinhold’s Versuch for its understanding
of Kant, while the other is inspired prima-
rily by Reinhold’s ‘Letters’. The first group
includes the radical Kantians, especially the
aforementioned Diez.
On the basis of his reading of Kant, Diez
reaches the conclusion that divine revelation
is impossible and consequently he refuses to
acknowledge the authority of the Lutheran
confessions of faith. In 1792, he moves to
Jena to study medicine. For his friends and
fellow students in the Stift, but also for the
younger generation of students, Diez’s action
proved too extreme.
In response, the other faction adhered to
Reinhold’s aim in the ‘Letters’ to try and
Reception and Influence
bring about a reconciliation of Kantian
philosophy and the insights of the theology
of G. C. Storr, who emphatically asserted
the necessity of divine revelation. The most
important representative of Storrian theol-
ogy is Gottlob Christian Rapp (1763–1794),
whose writings have been studied intensively
by Hegel during his time in Bern and pro-
foundly influenced his early thought.76
For this second group, the discussion of the
moral argument, brought up by Flatt already
in the late 1780s, was of crucial importance.
Flatt rejects the Kantian moral argument, but
only because it is considered by Kant as the
only possible proof for the existence of God
and immortality. In contrast to what he sees
as its one-sidedness, Flatt states that Kant’s
argument is a merely subjective proof which
cannot lay claim to any ‘objective validity and
necessity’. This culminates in Flatt’s charge
of blind faith encapsulated in the Kantian
dictum ‘I want there to be a God [ich will,
daß ein Gott sey]’.77
In fact, Flatt denounces Kantian philoso-
phy generally as ‘subjective idealism’ – notice
that this will become the central criticism
levelled by Hegel and Schelling against both
Kant and Fichte. Flatt, however, not only crit-
icizes the Kantian approach, on the basis of
its shortcomings he himself also attempts to
argue for the proof of revelation as presented
by the Storr school. His main argument is
that Kant’s one-sided moral argument must
be bolstered by a physico-theological proof
in conjunction with a cosmological proof.
Rapp, Hegel and Kantian Morality
In early 1795, Schelling complains in a let-
ter to Hegel about the excitement of the self-
proclaimed Kantians in the Stift dwelling
on the moral argument.78 Hegel replies that
he is occupied with extending the moral-
308
theological proof with a physico-theological
proof, a project that Schelling positively wel-
comes.79 Although at that point the details of
Hegel’s project have yet to be worked out,
it is striking that Hegel proclaims a plan of
action against the one-sidedness of Kant’s
moral proof that is remarkably similar to
that of his teacher Flatt.
At the time of this correspondence, Hegel
is also occupied with a lengthy essay by
Rapp on Kant’s notion of the moral incen-
tive (Triebfeder).80 Rapp is a relatively
unknown, but nonetheless pivotal figure in
the Kant debate in the Stift. Just before he
became Repetent in the Stift he studied with
Reinhold in Jena during 1790. His philo-
sophical concern was to reconcile Kantian
philosophy with the theology of the Storr
school. For this reconciliation he leans heav-
ily on Reinhold’s ‘Letters’, but not without
criticism.
According to Reinhold, the merit of the
Critical philosophy was that it redeemed the
‘religion of the pure heart’ by establishing a
new ‘religion of pure reason’.81 Rapp argues
that the way of the heart cannot be elevated
by reason, i.e. by virtue of the Kantian moral
argument. The heart, though, remains indis-
pensible for moral motivation, for it occupies
an intermediate position between sensibility
and the moral law by means of which it is
able to inform the ‘sensuous inclinations of
the subject’ with an incentive that is both
sensuous and moral.82
The heart, that is, the love of the heart, is
thus to be considered the mediator between
sensibility and the moral law. This mediat-
ing faculty is required, because sensuous
inclinations can only be opposed by a mor-
ally informed incentive acting in the sensible
realm itself. The heart becomes a loving heart
first by upbringing. The unconditional love
for us felt by our fathers implants requited

love in our hearts enabling us to follow their
laws by virtue of a loving heart. The laws
of our fathers, however, do not necessar-
ily correspond to the moral law. Therefore,
Christianity provides the example of a loving
father and the fulfilment (πλήρωμα) of the
moral law in the real life of God’s beloved
Son. Since this example has originally been
provided for mankind, it is no longer neces-
sary for each of us to perform the hard task
of a compulsory love for the divine lawgiver;
it is enough to be ‘infatuated’ with the testi-
mony of the real life of Jesus Christ revealing
in man’s hearts that to follow the law is no
longer a cold demand of moral reason, but
an easy demand of the heart.
It is Rapp’s intent to replace the ‘frigidity’
of the moral law and likewise the cold feeling
of respect (Achtung) of Kantian moral phi-
losophy by the mediating reality of a loving
heart that is informed by the moral law. Only
such a heart can affect us genuinely and can
oppose our manifold sensuous inclinations.
Kantian morality, by contrast, stays within
the realm of the intellect and does not affect
the sensible realm where genuine actions are
performed. Thus, Kantian transcendental
philosophy cannot go beyond its own intel-
lectual bounds and is thus unable to have any
impact on the real world that is in great need
of being transformed, at least according to
many of the students of the Stift.
The programmatic claims of Rapp con-
verge in Hegel’s fragment Der Geist des
Christentums. Hegel writes: ‘To complete
subjection [Knechtschaft] under the law of
an alien Lord, Jesus opposed not a partial
subjection under a law of one’s own, the
self-coercion of Kantian virtue [Tugend],
but virtues without lordship and without
submission, i.e., virtues as modifications of
love [. . .] as modifications of one living spirit
[Geist].’83 According to Hegel too, we are in
309
Reception and Influence
need of a principle that mediates between
sensibility and morality in order to bring
about a virtuous sentiment.
The origin of the post-Kantian idealist tra-
dition is thus not the result of a direct discus-
sion and confrontation with Kant, but rather
is the effect of debates initiated by Reinhold’s
reception of the Kantian philosophy and its
problems highlighted against the backdrop
of Storrian theology.
The Limited Role of Fichte
The commonly assumed influence of Fichtean
philosophy must be put into perspective. It
is certainly true that Fichte’s Versuch einer
Kritik aller Offenbarung (1792) immediately
became the object of intense study in the
Stift. Its central argument, however, that rev-
elation is not only possible but also necessary
for the sustainability of the moral order, was
not shared by the students of the Stift.
The Storrian Friedrich Gottlieb Süßkind
(1767–1829) argues in a lengthy essay
that Fichte’s proof of the possibility of rev-
elation is a recipe for reinstalling orthodox
theology,84 which was an imminent peril that
had to be averted. Hegel expresses a very
similar criticism in relation to his plan of
expanding the moral argument with physico-
theology, as Fichte ‘restores the old-fashioned
way of proving in [Christian] dogmatics’.85
The general charge of dogmatism against
Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre is also brought
by Hölderlin, for Fichte in his theory aims
to go beyond the fact of consciousness. In his
fragment ‘Seyn, Urtheil und Modalität’ this
critique is specified insofar as, in Hölderlin’s
view, being cannot be subordinated to self-
consciousness.
Post-Kantian idealism is not a linear
development from Kant to Hegel. Things are
far more complicated than this influential
Reception and Influence
historical interpretive model suggests.
Although without Kant’s Critical philoso-
phy it is indeed impossible to understand the
later developments in German philosophy, its
direct historical influence, however, is easily
overrated if one does not address the impact
of the interpretation of Kantian thought by
Reinhold and the Storrians.
The philosophy of Fichte is a special case
within this development. Contrary to his con-
temporaries, he approached Kant’s philoso-
phy more directly, even to an extent that his
anonymously published Versuch einer Kritik
aller Offenbarung was initially widely – even
by Reinhold – considered to be a publication
from Kant himself.
When Fichte came into contact with
Reinhold’s writings, he was fascinated by
his attempt to establish the whole system
of knowledge on the basis of one primary
principle. He was ignorant about the fact
that by 1792 Reinhold’s foundational phi-
losophy had already come under heavy
attack, for which Diez was to a large extent
responsible.
However, when Fichte presented his far
more advanced foundational philosophy in
the form of his Wissenschaftslehre (1794) the
Stift-ians had sharpened their critical assets.
The younger Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling
never embraced Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre;
they already believed they had to hand the
philosophical means that would supersede
subjective idealism in either its Kantian or
Fichtean mode.
In conclusion, with regard to post-Kan-
tian idealism, at least two different lines of
development must be distinguished. One line
leads via Reinhold’s Grundsatzphilosophie
to Fichte and the other via Reinhold’s
‘Letters’ to Hegel’s absolute idealism. For
the latter development Fichte was of minor
importance. – EOO
310
Further Reading
K. Ameriks, The Fate of Autonomy.
Problems in the Appropriation of
the Critical Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
F. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle
against Subjectivism 1781–1801
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2008).
D. Henrich, Grundlegung aus dem Ich.
Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des
Idealismus. Tübingen – Jena 1790–1794, 2
volumes (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 2004).
R.-P. Horstmann, ‘The reception of the
Critique of Pure Reason in German
Idealism’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), pp. 329–345.
K. Marx, The Usefulness of the
Kantian Philosophy. How Karl
Leonhard Reinhold’s Commitment to
Enlightenment Influenced His Reception
of Kant, in the series Reinholdiana, vol. 1
(Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2011).
K. L. Reinhold, Letters on the Kantian
Philosophy, ed. K. Ameriks (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Hegel’s Appropriation of Kant’s
Theoretical Philosophy in the
Jena Period
Kant’s ‘authentic idealism’
Throughout his oeuvre, Hegel consistently
stressed the necessity to distinguish between,
on the one hand, the ‘spirit’ or ‘principle’ of
Kant’s thought, and, on the other hand, the
‘letter’ of Kant’s philosophy, or its actual

execution. In spirit or principle, Hegel
believes that Kant’s philosophy contains a
core of potentially ‘authentic’ or ‘true ide-
alism’.86 In its specific execution however,
Hegel deems it fundamentally insufficient.
Kant’s idealism remains a ‘subjectivism’
insofar as it affirms the opposition between
concept (Begriff) and being (Sein). In this
way, Hegel alternates between praise for the
potential of the principle of Kantian thought,
and criticism of its actual execution.
The meritorious principle which Hegel
takes to guide Kant’s thought is that philoso-
phy should consist in a self-justification of
reason. For Hegel, this means that self-con-
sciousness must show itself to be the implicit
unity of all explicit conceptual oppositions.
However, Kant succeeded in developing such
an ‘authentic idealism’ only from a ‘limited
standpoint [eingeschränkten Standpunkt]’.87
Hegel identifies several aspects of Kantian
thought which contain this ‘authentic Idea
of Reason’.88 First, it is expressed in the
question guiding CPR: ‘How are synthetic
judgments a priori possible?’ The turn with
which Kant set out to put metaphysics on
the ‘secure course of a science’ (Bxviii), con-
sisted in the hypothesis that objects conform
to our knowledge, rather than the other way
around. That is to say, critical philosophy
must involve an investigation into the ways
in which the object of experience must be
thought in accordance with the rules of the
understanding.
The ways in which the object must be
thought are expressed by the categories,
on which rests any synthetic judgment a
priori. Hegel writes: ‘The determinations
of thought or concepts of the understand-
ing make up the objectivity of experience
[Erfahrungserkenntnisse]. They contain
relations only [überhaupt], and therefore
through them synthetic judgments a priori
311
Reception and Influence
are formed.’89 By shifting in this way the
focus of the inquiry from the content of an
experience to its form (the ‘relations’ under
which any object of experience must nec-
essarily be thought), Kant manages, in his
intentions at least, to break through the
opposition between the subjective and the
objective, since, in Hegel’s words, for Kant
‘[t]he objectivity here means the element of
universality and necessity, i.e. of the determi-
nations of thought themselves – the so-called
a priori’.90 From this point of view, Kant’s
philosophy is true idealism because objectiv-
ity is taken in terms of the determinations of
thought, rather than as simply opposed, or
external, to them.
Secondly, for this same reason, Hegel finds
in Kant’s philosophy a core of true idealism
‘insofar as it shows, that neither the concept
in isolation nor intuition in isolation is any-
thing at all; that intuition by itself is blind
and the concept by itself is empty’.91 Since
for Hegel any self-justification of reason
must entail that subjectivity recognize itself
as absolute (i.e. the implicit unity of what is
explicitly opposed), Hegel takes Kant’s stipu-
lation that neither intuitions nor concepts
can by themselves yield knowledge to be
fully justified.
Lastly, it is above all in the Transcendental
Deduction that Hegel recognizes in Kant’s
philosophy an authentic idealism: ‘It is one
of the profoundest and truest insights to be
found in the Critique of Reason that the unity
which constitutes the essence of the concept
is recognized as the original synthetic unity
of apperception, the unity of the “I think”, or
of self-consciousness.’92
The Implicit Principle of Speculation
The greatest merit of Kant’s turn in metaphys-
ics is that it asserts that the ‘highest point’
Reception and Influence
(CPR B134n) of the justification of knowl-
edge is to be found in self-consciousness, as
Hegel approvingly observes: ‘The principle
of speculation is the identity of subject and
object, and this principle is most definitely
articulated in the deduction of the forms of
the intellect (Verstand).’93
This principle is a principle of speculation,
since as the implicit, speculative, identity of
subject and object, or of concept and being,
consciousness cannot be thought in terms of
either side of that opposition. According to
Hegel, however, Kant’s standpoint is ‘lim-
ited’, precisely because it restricts the validity
of the principle of the understanding itself to
appearances only, excluding from its domain
things in themselves, based on his infamous
doctrine of the unknowability of things in
themselves. This means that, for Hegel, the
discovery of the speculative identity of sub-
ject and object reverts back to one side of
that opposition: although Kant distinguishes
the ‘objective’ from the ‘subjective’ unity of
consciousness (cf. CPR B139–140), Kant’s
critical philosophy will never be able to go
beyond subjectivism because of this restric-
tion of the validity of that unity.
The Ontological Proof of God’s Existence
The specific form of Hegel’s critique of Kant’s
execution of the self-justification of reason is
well brought out in his treatment of Kant’s
critique of the ontological proof of the exist-
ence of God. It is here that what Hegel takes
to be the essential trait of Kant’s critical sub-
jectivism comes to light most prominently,
viz. an affirmation of the opposition between
thought and being.
Kant’s criticism of the ontological proof
rests precisely on the assumption that the cat-
egories are restricted to possible experience,
that is, that their application only holds for a
312
given empirical manifold of representations.
Since with the concept of God an object is
thought which by definition cannot be given
in experience, its existence can ex hypothesi
never justifiably be known on this ground.
The only thing that can be shown, accord-
ing to Kant, is (1) the necessary regulative
function of the idea of God, and (2) the
necessity to postulate God’s existence as a
demand of practical reason. For Kant, the
ontological proof rests entirely on the deduc-
tion of existence from concepts. But since for
Kant existence (Dasein or Wirklichkeit) is a
category with a restricted use, judging that
something exists can never be justified on the
basis of thought alone but always requires
empirical intuition.
Beyond Kant’s Subjectivism
For Hegel, herein lies the very core of Kantian
subjectivism: it is an explicit affirmation of
the opposition between thought and being.
This, however, is not a ‘false’ or ‘wrong’
opposition, and Hegel indeed sees its explica-
tion by Kant as highly valuable. Its merit, at
this point, consists in the expression of that
difference ‘in its highest abstraction and in its
truest form’,94 since at bottom all knowledge
consists precisely in the implicit or specula-
tive identity of thought and being.
That this identity cannot be ‘known’ as
per the rules of the understanding Hegel
takes to be one of Kant’s ‘excellent discover-
ies [vortreffliche Entdeckung]’.95 Yet to state
that, because of this, this speculative princi-
ple is nothing for knowledge, that it stands
over against knowledge and cannot itself be
brought before consciousness, is where Hegel
refuses to follow Kant.
In Hegel’s view, knowledge precisely consists
in this very absolute identity, and a true self-
justification of reason will have to bring every

opposition (most especially the difference in
its ‘highest abstraction’ – as between thought
and being) back to consciousness itself. The
Kantian ‘I think’ as the highest point of the
Deduction potentially expresses this insight
into the truly synthetic absolute identity of
the subjective and the objective, but remains
abstract or formal once the restriction of its
validity reverts the ‘I’ back to the merely sub-
jective. A truly synthetic concept of self-con-
sciousness must, according to Hegel, recognize
its dependence on the content of its specific
determinations, which leads to a much more
differentiated concept of self-consciousness
(ultimately, in his later philosophy, as ‘spirit’),
rather than it being merely a formal rule of the
understanding with restricted validity.
The same problem holds for Kant’s cat-
egories: they must remain formal and will
never be more than ‘static, dead pigeonholes
of the intellect [ruhenden toten Fächern der
Intelligenz]’,96 whereas a true self-justifica-
tion of reason must be able to show how
each category flows dynamically from con-
sciousness itself, which can be explained by
focusing on the way in which each category
implies, and brings with it, its own opposite.
In this way, although much of Hegel’s
thought on objectivity clearly bears the
hallmarks of Kant’s major discoveries, the
project of transcendental philosophy changes
significantly from the Kantian project of
the self-justification of reason in terms of a
restriction and limitation of the understand-
ing to possible experience into the path or
development of consciousness towards fully
self-conscious ‘spirit’, by tracing the dynamic
logic of reason’s own determinations and
categories and therewith progressively recog-
nizing itself as absolute subjectivity.
Hegel’s early intuitions regarding such a
project receive their first systematic expo-
sition, in all their theoretical and also
313
Reception and Influence
practical-philosophical facets, in his major
work Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807, and
are carried through in the Science of Logic
and afterwards. – JdJ
Further Reading
K. Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy.
Problems in the Appropriation of
the Critical Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), pt. IV.
W. Bristow, Hegel and the Transformation
of Philosophical Critique (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007).
R.-P. Horstmann, ‘Hegels Konzeption
von Rationalität – die Verbannung des
Verstandes aus dem Reich der Wahrheit’,
in Die Grenzen der Vernunft. Eine
Untersuchung zu Zielen und Motiven
des Deutschen Idealismus, third edition
(Frankfurt a/M: Klostermann, 2004),
pp. 123–142.
R. B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism. The
Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), pt. I.
D. Schulting, ‘Hegel on Kant’s synthetic a priori
in Glauben und Wissen’, in Hegel-Jahrbuch
2005: Glauben und Wissen. Dritter Teil,
ed. A. Arndt, K. Bal & H. Ottman (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 2005), pp. 176–182.
S. Sedgwick, Hegel’s Critique of Kant
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Schopenhauer’s Reception of
Kant
Schopenhauer encounters Kant
With his father’s apparent suicide in 1805,
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was
Reception and Influence
released from what he saw as his depress-
ing destiny in the family merchant business.
Turning to the study of medicine and physi-
ology, Schopenhauer soon became enthralled
by philosophy, especially Kant and Plato.
Under G. E. Schulze’s tutelage in Göttingen,
Schopenhauer read Kant first-hand and
became acquainted with the criticisms that had
been levelled for two decades at the Critical
philosophy. In 1811, Schopenhauer moved to
Berlin to study with Fichte, but he soon became
disappointed in Fichte’s lectures finding them
obscure to the point of obscurantism.97 Worse
still, Schopenhauer thought Fichte (as well as
Schelling and Hegel) had steered philosophy
back to the kind of rationalist project thor-
oughly discredited by the First Critique. For
these and other reasons, Schopenhauer har-
boured a career-long hostility to Schelling,
Fichte and Hegel (in order of increasing dis-
dain) of which he made no secret.
Schopenhauer was the first ‘back to Kant’
philosopher. His aim was to ‘take up directly
from Kant’ in order to modify and offer a
self-consistent transcendental idealist sys-
tem.98 This has not generally been recognized
by commentators since Schopenhauer makes
greater knowledge claims concerning the
thing in itself than Kant ever thought possi-
ble, namely, in addition to the world as repre-
sentation, there is another side of the coin, as
it were, the world as will. In order to see how
Schopenhauer thought he could stay true to
Kant’s transcendental idealism while identify-
ing the Kantian thing in itself with will – con-
ceived as a non-teleological and thus ‘blind’
striving – one must turn to Schopenhauer’s
reception of Kant’s epistemology.
Modifications to Kant’s Epistemology
In his doctoral dissertation, The Fourfold Root
of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813–14;
314
revised 1847), Schopenhauer argues for several
modifications and simplifications of Kant’s
picture of the cognitive faculties. The under-
standing should not be construed as the fac-
ulty for thinking intuitions through pure and
empirical concepts. Rather, it non-conceptu-
ally transforms sensory intuitions into a world
of experience ordered in space, time and cau-
sality. On Schopenhauer’s view, basic human
sensory experience is not-yet-conceptualized
and is similar – with variations for different
sensory organs – to that of non-human ani-
mals. The fact that non-human animals do not
use language and thus seem to lack concepts
but nonetheless perceive and act intelligently
constitutes evidence, in Schopenhauer’s view,
for construing the understanding as operating
non-conceptually. Distinctive to human cogni-
tion is the faculty of reason, but in contrast
to Kant, according to Schopenhauer reason is
nothing but the faculty that abstracts concepts
from experience and imposes four modes of
explanation, that is, the four roots of the prin-
ciple of sufficient reason, onto experience as
well as onto our judgments.99
This changed picture of the cognitive facul-
ties means that while Schopenhauer agrees with
Kant in the view that ‘concepts without intui-
tions are empty’ he disagrees with the view that
‘intuitions without concepts are blind’ (CPR
A50–51=B74–75). On the contrary, intuitions
without concepts form a class of knowledge he
calls ‘feeling’ (Gefühl) or ‘intuitive knowledge’
(intuitive Erkenntniß) as opposed to concep-
tual knowledge (Wissen).100
Identification of the Thing in Itself as ‘Will’
The best summary of Schopenhauer’s recep-
tion of Kant’s metaphysics is to be found in the
Appendix to the first volume of his magnum
opus The World as Will and Representation
(1818, revised with a second volume in 1844;

third edition 1859) titled ‘Critique of the
Kantian Philosophy’. Here we gain a sense of
the Kantian views from which Schopenhauer
never wavered: He asserts that ‘Kant’s great-
est merit is to distinguish between appearance
and thing in itself – by proving that the intellect
always stands between us and things, which
is why we cannot have cognition of things as
they may be in themselves’.101 Another doc-
trine from which he never departs is Kant’s
distinction between the empirical and intel-
ligible character, which Schopenhauer consid-
ers ‘one of the most excellent things anyone
has ever said’.102 We also get a sense of how
Schopenhauer interpreted Kant’s version of
transcendental idealism from the fact that he
praises the exposition of it in P and asserts
the superiority of the first edition of the First
Critique over the second, claiming that the
latter spoiled its insights.
To put things in contemporary scholarly
terms, Schopenhauer thought that the best way
to understand Kant’s transcendental idealism
is as a ‘two-worlds’ or ‘causality’ view rather
than as a ‘two-aspects’ or ‘identity’ view.103
Interestingly, Schopenhauer’s own version of
transcendental idealism is well characterized
as a metaphysical version of a two-aspects or
identity view: The world has two sides, the
world as we represent it, and the way it is in
itself, as will. But these two sides are not related
causally, rather, the world of representation is
the ‘objectification’ of the world as will.
To arrive at this view, Schopenhauer recon-
figured transcendental idealism in a way that
would avoid the criticism levelled famously
by Jacobi and Schulze that Kant had unjus-
tifiably applied the category of causality to
things in themselves. Further, Schopenhauer
adhered very strictly to the notion that space,
time and causality are exclusively forms that
the subject imposes to structure the world
of representation. Accordingly, there are at
315
Reception and Influence
least two things, for Schopenhauer, we can
know about the thing in itself: It is not spa-
tiotemporal and it may not be understood
as causally related to phenomena. It is the
strict adherence to the exclusive subjectiv-
ity of space and time as well as to the claim
that space and time constitute the principle
of individuation that leads Schopenhauer
to argue that Kant should have talked only
about unindividuated ‘thing in itself’ in the
singular, although strictly speaking the thing
in itself is not ‘one’ in the way an object is
one, nor in the way a concept is one, rather,
the will is ‘one in the sense that it lies outside
of [ . . . ] the possibility of multiplicity’.104
Notwithstanding his agreement with Kant
that we can never have direct cognition of
the thing in itself, there is a very special
instance of knowledge – one’s first-personal
insight into acts of volition – that is immedi-
ate in the sense that it is not mediated by the
forms of space or causality, but which is still
known in ‘the form of time, as well as that of
being known and of knowing in general’.105
Schopenhauer believes the distinctive imme-
diacy of an individual’s epistemic access to
her own body in acts of willing licenses an
identification of the thing in itself with will.
In a revealing passage Schopenhauer writes:
It is nonetheless fair to say that we are
only using a denomination from the
superior term [a denominatio a potiori]
that gives the concept of will a broader
scope than it has had before. [ . . . ] no
word [could] designate the concept of this
genus. Accordingly, I will name the genus
after its most important species; the more
intimate and immediate cognition we
have of this species leads to the mediated
cognition we have of all the others.106
The rhetorical device that Schopenhauer
explicitly employs to call the thing in itself
Reception and Influence
‘will’ is the denominatio a potiori, literally,
‘receiving its name from what is better, supe-
rior or greater’. What Schopenhauer offers us
is metonymical insight into the thing in itself.
He is trying to get us to widen the extension
of the concept of ‘will’ which we know from
our nearly immediate experience of willing
beyond the bounds of possible sensation to
the thing in itself, and invites his readers to
do this on the strength of their special insight
into their own wills.
This is the same kind of sensible confirma-
tion by way of a felt connection that Kant
affirms in §59 of the Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment (CJ 351ff.), namely the notion that
beauty is a symbol of morality, except that
the Schopenhauerian connection is not to be
brought about by the felt recognition of struc-
tural analogies, but rather, by felt contiguity;
that is, we gain insight into the nature of the
thing in itself by being part of the in-itself,
and by experiencing ourselves in the least
mediated way available.107 Another place to
look in Kant for the origin of Schopenhauer’s
metonymical mode of making the thing
in itself sensible is CJ 338–346 (§§56–57),
where Kant resolves the antinomy of taste
by invoking the ‘supersensible substratum of
appearance’. Here as well, Kant sees a role
for feeling (aesthetic feeling) in making the
rational idea of the thing in itself sensible
without being able to provide a direct intui-
tion thereof.
Aesthetics
Schopenhauer faults Kant’s aesthetic theory
for its focus on judgments rather than on aes-
thetic experience, but applauds it for giving the
correct ‘general method of investigation’ for
aesthetics. The correct method is the largely
subjective method of investigating the elements
in human nature which, when stimulated in a
316
certain way, prompt us to judge an object as
beautiful or sublime, as opposed to the largely
objective investigations of Aristotle, Burke,
Winckelmann, Lessing and Herder.108 Kant’s
theory of the sublime comes in for high praise,
however, and in his Studienhefte entry on
the Third Critique (1808–11), one sees that
Schopenhauer was clearly moved by it: ‘How
true and fine is what he says about the sub-
lime!’ He qualifies this appraisal only as fol-
lows: ‘[O]nly a few things in his language and
the fatal faculty of reason [die fatale Vernunft]
are to be overlooked.’109
Affinities between their views include the
conception of aesthetic experience as disin-
terested and a focus on both nature and art.
This follows in the tradition of eighteenth
century aesthetics, although Schopenhauer
understands aesthetic experience more par-
ticularly as ‘will-less’ (willenlos). In addition,
Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime is really
a transformation of Kant’s theory that retains
the distinction between the mathematical
and dynamical sublime, the mixed painful/
pleasurable nature of the experience that is
theorized as a kind of oscillation between, on
the one hand, fear (dynamical) or frustration
(mathematical) and, on the other, exaltation
in the felt recognition of a supersensible qual-
ity in ourselves. The main difference between
their respective accounts derives from
Schopenhauer’s excision of the role of reason
– ‘die fatale Vernunft’ – in the experience.110
Yet, Schopenhauer departs from Kant’s aes-
thetic theory in several ways. Schopenhauer
sees a greater cognitive import of the experi-
ence of the beautiful and sublime than did
Kant. In place of Kant’s cognitive free-play in
an experience of beauty, Schopenhauer sees
a ‘perception of Ideas’, the ideas being the
essential features of the phenomenal world.
Since the perception of Ideas is a somewhat
rare form of intuitive knowledge, this renders

art highly significant from a cognitive per-
spective. The most significant art form on
his view is music. Absolute music, that is,
non-programmatic music without a text, for
Schopenhauer bypasses the Ideas and affords
a ‘copy of the will’ by expressing universal
human emotions and strivings shorn of any
particular context in the phenomenal world.
Like first-personal volitional insight – the
basis on which Schopenhauer identifies the
world in itself with ‘will’ – absolute music is
experienced only in time, without the media-
tion of other forms of cognitive conditioning
such as space and causality. It thus affords,
for Schopenhauer, the closest – though still
not entirely immediate – access we can have
to the nature of the in-itself of the world.
Ethical thought
Schopenhauer’s most pronounced departure
from Kant concerns his ethical thought. In
his essay ‘On the Basis of Morality’ (1840,
published with his essay ‘On the Freedom of
the Will’ in 1841) Schopenhauer spends the
entire first half of the essay offering a highly
critical assessment of Kant’s ethics before giv-
ing his positive account of the basis of moral-
ity. Schopenhauer argues that Kant begs the
question by assuming that morality has an
imperatival form, and anticipating G. E. M.
Anscombe’s criticism, continues that a ‘moral
law’ makes little sense without the notion
of a divine or worldly lawgiver. Further,
Schopenhauer does not think reason can
play the moral lawgiver role due to its being
merely a faculty for abstracting concepts from
and imposing on experience the four forms
of explanatory reasoning (the four roots of
the PSR). Relatedly, Schopenhauer does not
think reason can legitimately be seen as the
ground for any ‘causality through freedom’
insofar as this idea involves illegitimately
317
Reception and Influence
predicating causality beyond the bounds of
sense. Finally, Schopenhauer is outraged by
the fact that Kant’s ethics does not include
non-rational animals directly as objects of
proper respect, and believes it seriously ethi-
cally defective accordingly.
The basis of morality for Schopenhauer
is instead the feeling of compassion.
Compassion involves feeling the suffering
(or prospective suffering) of another as if
it were one’s own, and thus motivates one
to try to relieve (or to prevent) that suffer-
ing. Unlike sentimentalist views, however,
Schopenhauer believes there is a metaphysi-
cal basis that grounds the normativity of this
feeling. Whereas persons of predominantly
egoistic and malicious character see a ‘thick
partition’ between themselves and others, the
compassionate person recognizes the funda-
mental connection among all living beings.
This connection may be interpreted in a
robustly metaphysical fashion as a felt recogni-
tion of the unindividuated nature of the in-itself
of the world as will, or it may be interpreted
axiologically as the felt recognition of inherent
value in all living beings. If one favours the latter
interpretation (as this author does) one might
see a greater affinity after all between Kant and
Schopenhauer’s ethical views: Schopenhauer’s
view that all living beings have inherent value
may be seen as a transformation of Kant’s view
of rational nature as having inherent value. On
both interpretations, the compassionate per-
son, for Schopenhauer, ‘sees the world aright’
(to borrow Wittgenstein’s phrase), that is, inso-
far as she responds compassionately to the
suffering of others, she tracks the way things
really are. – SSh
Further Reading
P. Guyer, ‘Schopenhauer, Kant, and the
methods of philosophy’, in C. Janaway
Reception and Influence
(ed.) The Cambridge Companion to
Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), pp. 93–137.
P. Guyer, ‘Schopenhauer, Kant and
compassion’, Kantian Review 17,3
(2012): 403–429.
C. Janaway, ‘Necessity, responsibility and
character: Schopenhauer on freedom of
the will’, Kantian Review 17,3 (2012):
431–457.
M. Kossler, ‘The “perfected system of
criticism”: Schopenhauer’s initial
disagreements with Kant’, Kantian
Review 17,3 (2012): 459–478.
S. Shapshay, ‘Schopenhauer’s transformation
of the Kantian sublime’, Kantian Review
17,3 (2012): 479–511.
S. Shapshay, ‘Schopenhauer’s aesthetics and
philosophy of art’, Philosophy Compass
7,1 (2012): 11–22.
‘Back to Kant’: Neo-Kantianism
To come to grips with neo-Kantianism as a
philosophical movement, it is important to
see that neo-Kantianism primarily under-
stands philosophy as a science of founda-
tions. As such, neo-Kantianism underscores
the basic intention of metaphysics to address
fundamental questions concerning our
understanding of the world and ourselves.
From a historical point of view, Plato is
an important sparring partner for the neo-
Kantians. For Plato showed that we can only
understand the foundations of both things
and our knowledge of them, if we assume that
ideas transcend sensible experience. The neo-
Kantians thus agreed with Plato that philoso-
phy should be idealism. However, although he
tried to understand ideas as principles, Plato’s
classical metaphysical position insufficiently
318
differentiates between being and knowledge,
ontology and logic. He understands ideas as
themselves a type of being, i.e. general, tran-
scendent, non-sensible, and proper being.
Kant’s project of transcendental philoso-
phy makes an end to such a reification of
ideas. The domain of philosophical founda-
tions, ‘the transcendental’ so to speak, is dis-
covered to be a domain of principles that are
the ground for the validity of thought and
action as such. These principles should not be
understood as representing a type of entity or
being, but rather as the basis of the compre-
hension of what it is to describe something
as possessed of the quality of validity. That
is, they must be seen as conditions that first
enable and direct our thought and action.
Thus, principles are to be seen as preced-
ing experience without losing their intimate
relation to experience. Put in more general
terms, any putative ontology presupposes a
transcendental logic.
For Kant, knowledge has its ground in the
cognitive relation which is defined in terms
of the a priori conditions that make knowl-
edge and the objects of knowledge first possi-
ble. The objective validity of these conditions
lies in their function to enable possible
experience.
The Spiritual Background
This systematic link to the history of philos-
ophy is only one aspect of neo-Kantianism.
Another aspect concerns the fact that a phi-
losopher never operates in a cultural vacuum,
but is also always imbued with the spirit of
his own age. Neo-Kantianism is also a reac-
tion to its own cultural context and seeing it
from this perspective is important to inter-
preting it. The cultural or spiritual context of
neo-Kantianism is a complex one. I will high-
light one important line of influence.

This line starts with Hegel’s death as a his-
torical date that has symbolic meaning for the
history of philosophy: German Idealism had
lost its leading spiritual position in Germany.
Henceforth, natural science, a more histori-
cal orientation, realism, and the general ‘loss
of illusions’ gradually came to dominate
intellectual culture and this provoked a kind
of post-idealistic identity crisis. With Hegel’s
death his philosophy and the Hegelian con-
ception of the unity of facticity and meaning,
of reason and reality, gradually lost purchase.
As a result, not only the influential theme of
‘worldview’ (Weltanschauung) suggesting a
situated perspective on totality could spring
up and grow popular, but also all kinds of
naturalism and scientific reductionism, evok-
ing loss of meaning, of the richness and depth
of life, sprouted. The ghost of nihilism, of a
metaphysical void, dawned.
This spiritual background points already
to neo-Kantianism as it tried to overcome
the above-sketched post-idealistic gap
between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. The situation
becomes even more complex as the empiri-
cal sciences appeared to be emancipated
from philosophy and became wholly inde-
pendent. The question arose: why then still
philosophy?
Neo-Kantianism as Epistemology
By the mid-nineteenth century, marking out
and making sense of the field of properly
philosophical investigations had become
problematic. This problem leads us directly
to the beginning of neo-Kantianism. In reac-
tion to the identity crisis of philosophy, neo-
Kantianism, both in its early and its mature
forms, makes a case for the rehabilitation of
philosophy.
This rehabilitation starts with a clear com-
mitment to epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie)
319
Reception and Influence
as the ultimate foundational discipline of
both philosophy and the other sciences. To
be sure, this does not imply a reduction of
philosophy to epistemology: neo-Kantian
philosophy is about culture in the broad
sense, not just about knowledge and sci-
ence in the narrow sense. With respect to
the rehabilitation of philosophy, the neo-
Kantians, as the epithet suggests, return to
Kant.
Of course, many regard neo-Kantianism
as primarily an epistemological Kantian
movement. There are many reasons for
doing so. Widespread topical and meth-
odological uncertainty in the universities
led philosophers such as Eduard Zeller and
scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz to
attempt to provide philosophy with its own
topic and its own method, while at the same
time discussing the methods and principles
of the non-philosophical sciences, which
were developing ever so rapidly in their
time. Such attempts led to what at the end
of the 1870s became known as the Marburg
and Southwest Schools of neo-Kantianism.
Fairly soon these schools came to dominate
the epistemological debates of the nineteenth
century. It is therefore not entirely untrue to
see neo-Kantianism as primarily an episte-
mological movement.
However, more recent research on neo-
Kantianism suggests that this view is
responsible for much confusion about neo-
Kantianism. Especially the cultural-phil-
osophical nature of neo-Kantianism as a
reaction to a crisis has, as a result, been insuf-
ficiently acknowledged. Recent research has
emphasized that questions regarding world
view were in fact the driving force behind the
‘logical’ preoccupations of the neo-Kantians.
Despite the major differences in approach, it
is a modern philosophy of culture that unites
the Marburg and Southwest neo-Kantians.
Reception and Influence
The interpretation of Kant’s philosophy is
equally part of this goal.
Philosophy as Weltanschauung
The concept of ‘worldview’ (Weltanschauung)
serves as an abbreviation for the problem of
the validity of values and hence points to the
dispute about how culture is to be shaped.
Nihilism, the loss of faith in the rationality of
the world and the values assumed to be valid,
is not only a major challenge for neo-Kan-
tianism, but also a concern of many other
scientists and thinkers towards the end of the
nineteenth century.111
To understand neo-Kantianism properly,
however, it is important that the emphasis
on the cultural-philosophical aspect does
not lead one to disregard the specific way
in which the neo-Kantians put culture on
the philosophical agenda. Not just that neo-
Kantianism can be understood as a philoso-
phy of culture and that it understands itself
as such, but also how it is to be seen as a
philosophy of culture is what explains the
peculiar nature and unity of neo-Kantianism
as well as its relation to Kant and ultimately
its argumentative potential.
‘Back to Kant’
The labels ‘neo-Kantianism’ or ‘Critical phi-
losophy’ (Kritizismus) are best restricted to
the Marburg School  – whose main repre-
sentatives are Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp,
and Ernst Cassirer  – and the Southwest
German School, also called the Baden School
or Heidelberg School  – whose protagonists
were in particular Wilhelm Windelband,
Heinrich Rickert, Emil Lask, and Bruno
Bauch. Both schools are formed towards
the end of the 1870s. The Marburg and
Southwest Schools represent the mature
320
theories of neo-Kantian philosophy. (Of
course there also exist broader conceptions
of neo-Kantianism; some identify as many as
seven sub-schools.)
The famous dictum ‘back to Kant’, origi-
nating with Otto Liebmann,112 one of the
pathfinders for neo-Kantianism, encapsu-
lates in a concise and programmatic way
the determined recourse to Kant of the lead-
ing neo-Kantians. However, Kantian motifs
can be found not only in neo-Kantianism,
but in almost every philosophical school of
thought in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies (at least in the continental tradition).113
Therefore, an additional feature marking out
neo-Kantianism is needed. Windelband for-
mulated a dictum not less famous than that
of Liebmann: ‘To understand Kant rightly
means to go beyond him’. For the leading
figures of neo-Kantianism this dictum means
that the return to Kant is not a mere repro-
duction of his historical position; to under-
stand Kant means to further the development
of philosophy with the help of Kant.
However, the tendency to advance phi-
losophy by Kantian means is not specific
to neo-Kantianism. One must think here of
German idealists such as Fichte and Hegel.
Another additional feature is therefore
needed to determine the specific nature of
neo-Kantianism.
The problem of Validity
At the centre of the efforts of the neo-Kan-
tians, as indicated earlier, is the problem of
validity (Gültigkeit, Geltung). Taking the
validity of our theoretical and non-theoreti-
cal – practical, aesthetic, religious – endeav-
ours as its theme constitutes the core of
neo-Kantian philosophy. For neo-Kantian-
ism, philosophy is the theory of validity.
In developing a theory of validity, the neo-

Kantians emphasize a fundamental aspect of
Kant’s critical philosophy, namely that the
determinacy of human endeavours, being
products of reason, is to be established by
means of a determination of the principles of
their validity.
Neo-Kantians thus especially appreciate
Kant’s insight into the problem of validity
(cf. the quid juris issue in the Transcendental
Deduction of the categories). At the same
time, they find it important to develop fur-
ther Kant’s concept of philosophy, rather
than resort to metaphysical speculation
as did the German idealists or regard the
method of philosophy in terms of a posi-
tivistic approach to the nature of validity.
Neo-Kantians therefore do not only recover
Kant’s contribution to philosophy but their
aim is to renew it in the light of a different
constellation of philosophical problems from
Kant’s.
Against post-Kantian German Idealism,
neo-Kantians stress that philosophy should
not study things qua their being, but focus
on the validity of thinking things qua their
being. In some respects, one could see Hegel’s
logic as a development of Kant’s transcenden-
tal logic. On this reading, Hegel’s analysis of
the determinations of thought leads to a fun-
damental set of a priori conditions. For the
neo-Kantians, however, Hegel’s logical sys-
tem is not just a whole of logical conditions
for the validity of thoughts; they reproach
him for having conceptualized thought as
itself a metaphysical reality of spirit. In their
view, Hegel contaminates the radical founda-
tions of modernity with classical metaphys-
ics, hence departing from the framework of
Kantian transcendental philosophy.
Instead of taking the conditions of validity
of the thought of reality again as itself a real-
ity, the neo-Kantians discriminate sharply
between validity and being. Hence, they try
321
Reception and Influence
to correct the assumed metaphysical position
of Hegel by harking back to Kant’s critical
arguments. According to the neo-Kantians,
validity and being are related to each other
in such a way that, following Kant, being has
its foundation in validity, and ontology in
epistemology. According to their understand-
ing of Kant’s transcendental philosophical
method, philosophy takes as point of depar-
ture the given, i.e. a concrete experience, or
the fact (Faktum) of culture in order to estab-
lish its principles, or as Kant would put it, the
conditions of its possibility.
Pure versus Empirical Subject
For the neo-Kantians, as presumed succes-
sors of Kant, philosophy does not take as
its theme the world in terms of a direct rela-
tion to objects, as do the non-philosophical
sciences. They do not assume the ‘I’ or ‘con-
sciousness’ to be an empirical phenomenon,
nor do they take the relation between such
empirical phenomena and the world to be a
philosophical topic. Rather, philosophy aims
at determining the validity structure of expe-
rience. Time and again, neo-Kantians criti-
cize all kinds of metaphysical, psychological,
physiological and what nowadays is called
(neo)-structuralist and evolutionary-biolog-
ical conceptualizations of epistemology, or,
more comprehensively, of the philosophy of
culture. Such attempts understand knowledge
as an ontic relationship. According to the neo-
Kantians, these deficient conceptualizations,
including their agnostic and relativistic impli-
cations, deprive epistemology of its funda-
mental thematic: the validity of knowledge.
Neo-Kantians exclude the empirical sub-
ject and its anthropological and metaphysical
connotations from study insofar as they pri-
marily focus on a ‘pure subject’. This subject,
in the sense of the whole of the principles of
Reception and Influence
validity (a priori structures, values, etc.), is
understood as the foundation of all that can
be valid and hence as the ground for the pos-
sibility of objectivity. By means of this strat-
egy, which discriminates sharply between, on
the one hand, a ‘pure’ subject as foundation
of objectivity and an ‘empirical’ subject which
is grounded in that normative foundation, on
the other, the neo-Kantians try to overcome
what they consider to be certain exaggerated
positions or naïve, objectivist worldviews
be they called naturalism, materialism, psy-
chologism, empiricism, positivism, logicism,
fideism, historicism, Lebensphilosophie, or
nihilism.
Philosophy of Culture
As in theoretical philosophy, the relation
between the unconditional norm of the pure
subject and its conditional fulfilment by the
empirical subject equally plays a central role
in the philosophy of culture. This propor-
tional relation of validity makes clear that the
duality of facticity and meaning, of reason
and reality, of ‘is’ and ‘ought’, is grounded on
premises that turn out to be false.
We may illustrate this through Heinrich
Rickert’s concept of ‘meaning’. Meaning
is conceptualized as the recognition by the
finite rational being called ‘man’ of uncon-
ditionally valid theoretic and non-theoretic
values. The reciprocal relation of implica-
tion, and the one-sided relation of founda-
tion between the norm and that for which
the norm is, absolute demand and finite ful-
filment, principle and the concrete, implies of
course that the human production of mean-
ing is characterized by finitude.
Therefore, the neo-Kantians deny that
the duality of subject and object as between
an empirical subject and an inner or outer
world is fundamental to epistemology. They
322
develop another kind of relationship that not
only turns out to be more fundamental, but
also proves to be of great importance to the
development of a philosophy of culture.
Starting the philosophical analysis with
given cultural phenomena or spheres of cul-
ture, which implicitly contain objective valid-
ity claims, does not imply that the premise
of the analysis is a Faktum that is stipulated
dogmatically as valid. Rather, the analysis
takes such ‘facta’ as problematic, as a validity
claim that is in need of philosophical evalua-
tion. According to the neo-Kantians’ under-
standing of the method of transcendental
philosophy, the original determinacy of the
different spheres of culture is to be known
via an oblique, validity-reflexive disclosure of
the constituents of meaning of those spheres
of culture, i.e. of the principles of validity of
those claims.
The Primacy of ‘Ought’
Like Kant, the neo-Kantians understand
culture as a system of meaning in order to
provide a conceptual account of ‘the world
of man’. With this they aim to show reason
itself to be the governing principle of our
world, of culture.
Take the case of the Southwest School
of neo-Kantianism. Unlike the Marburg
School, the Southwest School did not fall
victim to the ‘narrow intellectualist’ focus of
Cohen, who restricted philosophical analy-
sis mainly to the cultural fact of scientific
knowledge, although the later development
of the Marburg School broadened the scope
of analysis as can be seen in the work of
Natorp and Cassirer. From the start, how-
ever, the Southwest School takes culture in its
widest sense.
The Southwest School conceives of culture
as determined by values. From a philosophical

point of view, what is called theoretical
culture (‘knowledge’) has a logical and a
systemic primacy. Already in theoretical phi-
losophy it turns out that theoretical culture
rests on a range of theoretical values (a priori
structures, principles), which determines the
validity of theoretical endeavours. The val-
ues that comprise the value ‘truth’ ought to
be normative for the thoughts of empirical
subjects in order to assure that their thought
yields knowledge of objects, i.e. that thought
is objective. This logical relation within the
realm of theoretical culture is then trans-
ported to other spheres of culture: these too
consist of subjects who acknowledge values.
In this sense, the Southwest School neo-
Kantians propagate the primacy of ‘ought’
(Sollen), a primacy of practical reason in
its most radical, and not just in its practical
sense, namely in the sense that it encompasses
all dimensions of reason. They propagate
a philosophy of values as a philosophy of
culture.
Numerous historical and systematic studies
of the first decades of the twentieth century
make clear that the Southwest School is to be
seen as a comprehensive philosophy of values.
But they also make clear that the concept of
value is a fundamental concept: philosophy
itself is essentially about values. The idea of
living through a metaphysical crisis fits in well
with this systematic perception. After all, the
exploration of values should contribute to the
overcoming of the post-German-Idealist divide
between values and reality that threatened
to make human orientation both practically
impossible and theoretically incomprehensi-
ble. The philosophy of values acts against the
culture of nihilism by showing that there are
values that are objectively valid.
Hence, the concept of ‘value’  – and
closely related concepts like ‘meaning’,
‘ought’, ‘validity’ – has a meaning that goes
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Reception and Influence
far beyond its methodological function in
the constitution of the subject matters of
the arts and humanities. It points to the
aforementioned metaphysical dimension
that contains the grounds of our thoughts
and actions.
The debate is thus not so much about the
validity and status of some traditional val-
ues. Rather, against the background of the
post-Idealist conception of reality as value-
free and without meaning, the debate focuses
primarily on the foundations of our under-
standing of the world and ourselves. Values
traditionally treated by metaphysics, such as
truth and morality, unity and plurality, value
and reality, function as a framework to ena-
ble our understanding of, and dealings with,
the world. Hence, the philosophy of values
operates against the background of nihil-
ism and aims at elucidating the principles of
human existence and the world that humans
live in.
In conclusion, the main schools of neo-
Kantianism take the basic problem of phi-
losophy to be that of the validity of our
theoretical and non-theoretical endeav-
ours. This problem is to be solved through
a determination of the principles of valid-
ity. These principles are what make up the
sphere of the ‘transcendental’. The transcen-
dental domain, therefore, is not to be con-
fused with the psychology of an empirical
subject or with the metaphysics of an abso-
lute reality.
Far from declaring the world we live in
to be meaningless, the neo-Kantians aim to
bring to light the philosophical foundations
of the world. Hence, they try to understand
the rationality of our world and its mean-
ing. The concept of culture functions as a
universal and fundamental framework, a
framework that was once occupied by meta-
physics. This framework is now freed from
Reception and Influence
ontological premises yet is still able to coun-
teract nihilism. – CK
Further Reading
A. Chignell (ed.), ‘On going back to Kant’,
special issue on neo-Kantianism in
The Philosophical Forum 39,2 (2008):
109–298.
M. Heinz, C. Krijnen (eds), Kant im
Neukantianismus: Fortschritt oder
Rückschritt? (Würzburg: Königshausen
& Neumann, 2007).
S. Luft, R. Makkreel (eds), Neo-Kantianism in
Contemporary Philosophy (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 2010).
D. Pätzold, C. Krijnen (eds), Der
Neukantianismus und das Erbe des
deutschen Idealismus (Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 2002).
K. Pollok, ‘The “Transcendental Method”.
On the reception of the Critique of Pure
Reason in neo-Kantianism’, in P. Guyer
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion
to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), pp. 346–379.
Heidegger’s ONTOLOGICAL
Reading of Kant
In the spring of 1929, Martin Heidegger
and Ernst Cassirer famously discussed their
views of Kant’s CPR before an audience of
philosophers and students who had come
to Davos from all over Europe. Heidegger,
aged 39, had acquired great fame through his
Marburg lecture courses and the publication
of Being and Time two years earlier.
Although he had lectured on Kant’s CPR
during the winter of 1927/1928, Heidegger
324
had not yet engaged with this text in writ-
ing. Davos offered him a pre-eminent
opportunity to challenge the neo-Kantian
approaches to Kant which had dominated
German academic philosophy from the
1870s onwards. It should be recalled, how-
ever, that neo-Kantianism was already wan-
ing, not in the least because Kant’s account
of pure intuition and a priori principles was
considered to have been refuted by Einstein’s
relativity theory.
Trying to reconcile Kant and Einstein,
Cassirer had contributed to this debate by
means of various publications. However, at
Davos the stakes of the debate were quite
different. In order to defend Hermann
Cohen’s legacy against Heidegger’s onto-
logical reading of CPR, Cassirer focused
on its humanistic and idealistic elements
rather than on Kant’s alleged foundation
of physics. Yet, as most of the participants
would have realized, his revision of neo-
Kantianism was no match for Heidegger’s
radical new philosophical voice. From now
on, Heidegger was to lead the way – not just
away from neo-Kantianism, but also from
the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl,
who until recently had regarded Heidegger
as one of his most promising pupils.
Heidegger’s ontological reading of CPR
also helped him to clarify his own approach
to philosophy, not least by marking the dif-
ference between it and both Cohen’s chiefly
epistemological interpretation of Kant and
Husserl’s focus on transcendental conscious-
ness. Drawing from his earlier lecture series
and the lectures he gave in Davos, he pub-
lished Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
in 1929. His other, less famous, texts on
Kant consist of various published lecture
courses partly or primarily devoted to Kant,
including Basic Problems of Phenomenology
(1927), Phenomenological Interpretations of

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1927/1928),
and What is a Thing? (1935/1936). The latter
text was first published as a book in 1962,
shortly after Heidegger wrote the essay  –
included in Pathmarks  – entitled ‘Kant’s
Thesis about Being’ (1961).
What these texts have in common is their
emphasis on Kant’s engagement with ontology
and metaphysics at large in CPR. However,
this aspect of Heidegger’s approach to Kant
was less revolutionary than it may seem today,
for in the early 1920s commentators such as
Heinz Heimsoeth and Max Wundt had elab-
orated on this issue as well. The true novelty
of Heidegger’s work rather lay in his effort to
track down the very source of the mode of
thought that traditionally was called ontol-
ogy. In Being and Time, Heidegger had con-
ceived of this source as temporality. In Kant
and the Problem of Metaphysics, to which
the rest of this essay is confined, Heidegger
radicalizes what he regards as Kant’s insight
into this source in such a way that it yields the
same result as the analytic of human finitude
elaborated in Being and Time.114
This procedure  – called ‘destruction’
in Being and Time  – is characteristic of
Heidegger’s engagement with the philo-
sophical tradition in general. In a first
movement, Heidegger opposes mainstream
interpretations of classical texts in order to
lay bare the insights he believed to have been
achieved by the philosopher under discus-
sion. Articulating, secondly, the unsaid in
that which is being said115, he attempts to
retrieve an insight that informs the history of
philosophy, yet which it had never been able
to appropriate. What philosophy should face
rather than repress, according to Heidegger,
is the radical finitude of human life.116
Since Kant’s account of knowledge affirms
this finitude at least to a certain extent,
Heidegger could regard his reading of Kant
325
Reception and Influence
as a ‘productive appropriation’ of the basic
thrust of Kant’s thought.117 Yet, as we will
see, he also considered Kant to have recoiled
from the insight he had reached in the first
edition of CPR. In what follows I discuss
the main stages of Heidegger’s attempt to
retrieve and radicalize this insight. Given the
limits of this essay, I will not dwell on those
elements of his reading that obviously violate
the meaning of Kant’s own formulations.
The ‘Critique’ as a foundation of ontology
Attacking neo-Kantianism head on, Heidegger
asserts that CPR has nothing to do with a the-
ory of experience or an epistemology.118 In his
view, Kant rather seeks to uncover the inner
possibility of any ontological knowledge, that
is, of the horizon that allows us to relate to
something as an object of experience in the
first place.119 This horizon is constituted,
according to Kant, by the basic synthetic a
priori principles that derive from the catego-
ries. As Heidegger points out, Kant aimed to
demonstrate why these categories cannot be
used to acquire a priori knowledge of the
soul, the world as such, and God, as special
metaphysics had always purported to do.
He argues, however, that Kant’s criticism
of special metaphysics (metaphysica spe-
cialis) did not entail a rejection of former
metaphysics per se. Quite the contrary: meta-
physics qua general metaphysics, or ontology,
had always investigated the concepts consti-
tutive of our knowledge of beings as such.
Since the Transcendental Analytic investi-
gates the possibility of using such concepts
to acquire knowledge of objects, this part
of CPR might well be considered to reflect
on the very possibility of ontology.120 Seen
in this way, CPR contains not just a critique
of special metaphysics, but also provides the
discipline formerly called ontology with its
Reception and Influence
proper foundation. CPR, Heidegger notes,
is ‘the foundation of metaphysics in that it
reveals the essence of ontology’.121
Intuition
Given his opposition to neo-Kantianism,
Heidegger understandably puts great empha-
sis on the role of intuition in CPR. Cohen
and his followers had downplayed the role of
the Transcendental Aesthetic by reinterpret-
ing space and time as categories in the logical
sense of the term.122
Heidegger, by contrast, takes Kant to mean
that human beings relate to the world pri-
marily and necessarily by means of intuition,
which means that their relation to objects is
essentially receptive.123 On this view, discur-
sive thought only has the task of clarifying and
ordering the contents perceived by the senses.
Heidegger even goes so far as to state that
thought stands essentially in the service of
intuition.124 It is intuition, as it were, that
uses the understanding to achieve its own
goal, namely, to reveal beings as objects.
Its dependence on the understanding  – qua
means – to achieve this goal is indicative of
the finitude of human thought as such.125
This does not entail, however, that human
thought is not creative at all. What it creates,
qua pure understanding, are the synthetic a
priori principles that reveal the ontological
structure of beings qua possible objects of
experience.126 It creates, in other words, the
‘horizon of objectivity’ that allows something
to appear as an object in the first place.127
The imagination
But is it really the understanding, or the
understanding alone, to which Kant assigns
the creation of this very horizon? According
to Heidegger, Kant’s texts by no means
326
warrant this view. Evidently, it was crucial
for Kant to present intuition and thought as
the two complementary ‘sources’ or ‘stems’
of our capacity to acquire knowledge of
something,128 for the rationalist metaphys-
ics he opposed purported to possess a priori
knowledge of things based on thought alone.
Yet in the Transcendental Deduction, Kant
also conceived of pure imagination as a basic
faculty of the soul that underlies all a priori
knowledge (A124).129 Moreover, he repeat-
edly notes that pure intuition, pure imagina-
tion and pure apperception together produce
the synthetic a priori cognition of objects
that precedes empirical knowledge.130
For Heidegger, however, imagination is
not just one of these three elements. Insofar
as human thought produces synthetic a pri-
ori principles, it does not relate to things
‘out there’, but presents to itself the possible
ways in which representations can be unified
or turned into objects of knowledge. Kant,
Heidegger argues, attributes this synthetic
activity primarily to pure imagination.131
Accordingly, it is primarily by dint of pure
imagination that we can conceive of beings
as possible objects of experience. Heidegger
takes this to imply that both pure intuition
and pure understanding (or transcendental
apperception) are merely derivative forms of
imaginative synthetic activity.132 Their myste-
rious ‘common root’, in other words, turns out
to be none other than pure imagination.133
As Heidegger points out, Fichte and
Schelling had interpreted Kant’s concep-
tion of pure imagination in a similar vein.134
Yet whereas the German Idealists went on
to identify this imagination with reason,135
Heidegger moves into the opposite direc-
tion. For, on his view, Kant’s remarks on pure
imagination precisely contest the hegemony
of thought celebrated by neo-Kantians and
German idealists alike.

He holds, moreover, that Kant opposed
this hegemony in an even deeper sense than
he himself was ready to admit. Confronted
with the ‘abyss’ opened up by his insight
into the nature of pure imagination, Kant in
the second edition of CPR conceived of its
activity as a mere function of the understand-
ing, thus removing the incongruity between
the content of CPR and its architectonic
division into Transcendental Aesthetic and
Transcendental Logic.136
The schematism
Heidegger puts pure imagination central stage
in order to highlight the role of the transcen-
dental schemas it produces. In his view, CPR
as a whole hinges on Kant’s account of the
schematization of the categories.137 According
to Kant, each category articulates a particular
way of connecting representations. Categories
only have meaning, however, insofar as their
content can be translated into rules that tell
us how to unify representations that affect
our inner sense one after the other, that is,
occur in time.
Thus, the schema of the category ‘sub-
stance’ tells us that we must a priori
determine something in our successive repre-
sentations as persisting, or unchangeable, in
order to constitute something as an object at
all.138 This means for Kant that the schemas
constitute particular determinations of time
qua pure intuition.139
Accordingly, Heidegger regards the tran-
scendental schemas as rules that bring about
the horizon within which something can
present itself as an object in the first place.140
In this sense, the schemas can be said to con-
stitute the true ground of any metaphysics. As
such, they also explain why categories cannot
be used to turn putative ‘things’ such as the
soul, the world as such, and God into objects
327
Reception and Influence
of knowledge. Indeed, as was noted above,
Kant reflected on the horizon of objectivity
produced by the transcendental schemas pri-
marily to oppose former special metaphysics.
Heidegger suggests, however, that this
very horizon constrains philosophical ques-
tioning in a more radical way than Kant
could admit. Human life, for example, can-
not be turned into an object of knowledge by
means of schematized categories. If the onto-
logical horizon revealed by Kant entails that
beings can only appear as objects of experi-
ence, then philosophy – concerned with the
being of beings – should not only affirm the
necessity of this horizon insofar as scientific
knowledge is concerned, but also oppose
its predominance within the realm of phi-
losophy. That is why Heidegger in Being and
Time as well as in the last part of Kant and
the Problem of Metaphysics proposes that
philosophy first of all reflect on the horizon
of any understanding of being.141
Temporality
In Being and Time, Heidegger aimed to
expose the limits of this horizon by arguing
that it tends to constrain our understanding
of being to that which is constantly present.
Constant presence, in its turn, refers to a par-
ticular mode of what Heidegger calls tempo-
rality. Since Kant’s account of the schematism
highlights the constitutive function of time
qua form of all representations, Heidegger
starts from this account to argue that the
horizon within which being can merely
present itself as constant presence relies on a
certain form of temporality.
He realized, however, that this step involved
a ‘more primordial repetition’142 of Kant’s
own foundation of metaphysics, since, in
his eyes, Kant’s conception of time remained
dependent on the traditional definition of
Reception and Influence
time in terms of successive now-­moments.143
Yet, on the other hand, Kant also conceived
of time as ‘pure self-affection’.144 Drawing
on the latter element of Kant’s conception of
time, Heidegger suggests that any synthesis
enacted by the understanding presupposes
such a primordial self-affection. On his read-
ing, even transcendental apperception, the
intellectual principle of any synthetic activity,
relies on a determination of the inner sense in
terms of time.145
For Heidegger, accordingly, Kant con-
ceived of time not just as the form in which
representations necessarily present them-
selves to us, but also as the non-intellectual
form of self-determination that opens up the
space within which beings can be understood
as possible objects of experience in the first
place. If this is the case, then the threefold
distinction between transcendental apper-
ception, time qua self-affection and pure
imagination  – a distinction that prevails in
Kant’s own account – dissolves into a form
of pure imagination that is temporal through
and through.146
In conclusion, Heidegger admitted the
violent nature of his reading of Kant already
in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
itself.147 But even though this work is driven
by questions foreign to CPR, it can be argued
that it offers valuable insights not just into
Heidegger’s own thought, but also into
aspects of Kant’s transcendental philosophy
which mainstream commentaries too often
ignore, reject or misconstrue.
All details aside, moreover, Heidegger’s
engagement with Kant is very similar to Kant’s
own engagement with the philosophical tra-
dition. Kant, as we have seen, criticized the
effort of metaphysics to achieve knowledge
of the soul, the world as such, and God by
means of concepts that are merely suitable to
turn phenomena into objects of knowledge.
328
On the other hand, he aimed to preserve
those elements of the metaphysical tradition
that he regarded as pertinent to the modern,
scientific worldview of his time. In a similar
way, Heidegger retrieved elements of Kant’s
philosophy that allowed him to criticize the
objectifying tendency of the scientific, tech-
nological and philosophical forms of thought
characteristic of late modernity. Seen in this
way, Heidegger may well have been more
faithful to the ‘spirit’ of Kant’s philosophy
than his texts suggest. – KdB
Further reading
W. Blattner, ‘Laying the ground for
metaphysics’, in C. B. Guignon (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Heidegger,
2nd enlarged edition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006),
pp. 149–176.
D. Dahlstrom, ‘The Critique of Pure Reason
and continental philosophy: Heidegger’s
interpretation of transcendental
imagination’, in P. Guyer (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010),
pp. 380–400.
P. Gorner, ‘Phenomenological interpretations
of Kant in Husserl and Heidegger’, in
G. Bird (ed.), A Companion to Kant
(Malden, MA/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
2010), pp. 500–512.
F. Schalow, The Renewal of the Heidegger-
Kant Dialogue: Action, Thought, and
Responsibility (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
1992).
C. M. Sherover, Heidegger, Kant, and Time
(Bloomington, IN/London: Indiana
University Press, 1971).
M. Weatherston, Heidegger’s Interpretation
of Kant: Categories, Imagination and

Temporality (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002).
Analytical Kantianism
Analytic Kantianism here refers to the influ-
ence of Kantian ideas on philosophy in the
analytic tradition, as opposed to interpre-
tations of Kant by analytically oriented
philosophers. To the extent that analytic
philosophy, in its early stages, was a specific
programme oriented around logical analy-
sis, it was not engaged with the history of
philosophy, and was officially opposed to
almost all central doctrines and concerns of
Kantianism.
However, in the broader sense in which it
refers to a style of philosophy which dominated
English-speaking philosophy departments in the
twentieth century, analytic philosophy became
increasingly interested in the history of philoso-
phy in general and Kant in particular, and parts
of Kant’s philosophy had a large influence on
central figures such as Peter Strawson, Wilfred
Sellars and Hilary Putnam.
As a specific programme, analytic philoso-
phy was centrally and originally associated
with the logicism of Bertrand Russell and
Gottlob Frege, the empiricism and positivism
of A. J. Ayer, Rudolf Carnap and the Vienna
Circle, and subsequently with the naturalism
of W. V. Quine. Logicism was the project of
attempting to reduce mathematics to logic;
positivism the rejection as meaningless of
claims that lack empirical content, and
Quinean naturalism questioned of all a pri-
ori knowledge. This programme was there-
fore explicitly and firmly opposed to central
Kantian claims, discussed below.
Most philosophers who consider them-
selves to be working in an analytic tradition
329
Reception and Influence
no longer accept the main goals and claims of
the original programme, and the term ‘ana-
lytic philosophy’ now has a broader, partly
institutional sense, in which it refers more to
an approach to philosophy than to a particu-
lar set of doctrines, or to a particular use of
the method of analysis. In analytic philoso-
phy in the broader sense, the strict focus on
logical analysis becomes an emphasis on con-
ceptual clarity, the programme of logicism
gives way to an emphasis on the importance
of logic as a central part of philosophy, and
the positivism of the early project shifts to a
broad naturalism and respect for the natural
sciences.
Kantianism is an important strand in ana-
lytic philosophy in the broader sense. Kant is
also a central figure in analytic ethics; ana-
lytic Kantian ethics is a topic in its own right,
and will be mentioned only briefly here.
Key tenets of Kant’s philosophy
Logicism, Carnapian empiricism and
Quinean naturalism centrally rejected key
tenets of Kant’s critical philosophy. Kant
presents CPR as addressed to the question:
how is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?
He thinks that if metaphysics is to be possi-
ble, there must be synthetic a priori knowl-
edge, since metaphysical claims must be
substantive, and not merely logical, but are
not claims within empirical science.
His solution to this question has three
parts, which Kant sees as inseparably inter-
connected: the idea of a priori intuition,
transcendental idealism and so-called ‘tran-
scendental arguments’. Kant thinks all sub-
stantive (synthetic) knowledge claims concern
objects which it is possible for us to have
presented to us in immediate, singular repre-
sentations, which he calls intuitions. Without
intuitions, we may have coherent conceptual
Reception and Influence
thought, but these thoughts will not succeed
in being about any actual object.
Like all synthetic claims, synthetic a pri-
ori claims require objects which can be given
to us in intuition, but since the claims are a
priori, these objects cannot be presented to
us merely empirically, through objects affect-
ing our senses. Kant’s solution is to propose
that we have a priori intuition: representa-
tions which are singular and immediately
present to us, yet which do not depend on
sense experience. Kant argues that space and
time are the a priori intuitions, or the a pri-
ori forms of our intuition. A priori intuition
makes synthetic a priori knowledge possible:
such knowledge is either a priori knowledge
of the structure of space and time – in which
case its ‘objects’ are the pure forms given to
us in a priori intuition; or knowledge of a
priori conditions of cognizing spatiotem-
poral objects – in which case its objects are
empirical, spatiotemporal objects.
Kant thinks that the idea that space and
time are the a priori forms of our intui-
tion leads to the complicated position he
calls transcendental idealism, according to
which the only objects of which we can have
knowledge are spatiotemporal objects which
affect our senses, and these objects are in
some sense dependent on the standpoint of
human cognition, or essentially connected to
the possibility of our being presented with
them (representing them).
Kant then thinks we can establish certain
synthetic a priori metaphysical claims by dem-
onstrating them to be necessary conditions
of the possibility of experience. What can be
known a priori to be a necessary condition of
the possibility of experience is true of all objects
of experience; since spatiotemporal objects
are essentially connected to our experience of
them, this enables us to establish certain neces-
sary truths about spatiotemporal objects.
330
While Kant does not use the term, the argu-
mentative strategy of defending synthetic a
priori claims by showing them to be condi-
tions of the possibility of experience has come
to be referred to as a transcendental argument.
A transcendental argument defends a contro-
versial claim by showing it to be a condition
of the possibility of a less controversial claim.
In sum, Kant’s project is characterized by the
inclusion of a kind of idealism, a belief in a sharp
and exhaustive analytic-synthetic distinction,
and a belief in more than one kind of neces-
sity, since both analytic a priori and synthetic
a priori claims have some kind of necessity, so
logical necessity is not the only necessity.
While Kant’s project is in a certain sense
a critique and rejection of metaphysics (sub-
stantive a priori knowledge of non-spatio-
temporal objects such as God and Cartesian
souls), it can also be seen as doing metaphys-
ics in another sense, in that it aims to come
up with necessary truths, known a priori,
about the spatiotemporal world.
From the early analytic programme’s
rejection of Kant to Strawson’s defence
The early analytic programme rejected all
of these aspects of Kant’s position. The aim
of logicism was to reduce mathematics to
logic, thereby doing away with Kant’s need
to invoke intuition, and rejecting the idea of
synthetic a priori knowledge (although Frege
continued to accept Kant’s view of geometry).
In addition to its positivism, the empiricism
of the Vienna circle was also centred around
the idea that the only a priori knowledge is
knowledge of analytic truths, and the only
kind of necessity is logical necessity. Both
movements explicitly rejected metaphysics.
Quine’s naturalism attacked the last cen-
tral Kantian claims about synthetic a priori
knowledge, in rejecting the idea of a sharp

analytic-synthetic distinction, and question-
ing the idea of any kind of a priori knowl-
edge. Thus, in its central, original programme,
twentieth century analytic philosophy was in
almost no sense Kantian.
If any one figure changed this picture, it
was the Oxford philosopher P. F. Strawson.
Strawson was an analytic philosopher both
institutionally and in terms of his commit-
ment to analysis, his concern with logic, his
rejection of idealism and of synthetic a priori
knowledge. However, Strawson was seriously
and centrally engaged with Kant, most nota-
bly in his controversial, brilliant and enor-
mously influential book about Kant, The
Bounds of Sense,148 and his no less remark-
able earlier book Individuals,149 arguably a
work of Kantian metaphysics.
While Strawson defended the analytic-
synthetic distinction against Quine, he mostly
discarded Kant’s central notion of synthesis,
thought that Kant had no clear and general
conception of the synthetic a priori and that
transcendental idealism was incoherent and
the chief obstacle to a sympathetic reading
of CPR. However, Strawson took a number
of central ideas from Kant, which he impres-
sively developed in his own work, and which
influenced subsequent analytic philosophy.
In addition to reviving interest in these ideas,
Strawson’s work, arguably, reignited the inter-
est of analytic philosophers in the history of
philosophy in general and Kant in particular.
A central aspect of Strawson’s Kantianism
is the idea of metaphysics as an investiga-
tion of the limiting framework of ideas and
principles required by empirical knowledge,
and implicit in any coherent conception of
experience, together with belief in a univer-
sal human conceptual scheme, and the philo-
sophical interest of exploring it. He revived
Kant’s attack on the coherence of minimal
empiricism, rejecting the attempt to provide
331
Reception and Influence
a foundation for ordinary experience and/or
science from sense data, and foregrounding
the unavoidability of experience-level con-
cepts such as the concept of a physical object.
He defended the central Kantian idea of an
essential connection between the experience
of a self-conscious agent and perception of
spatio-temporal objects. He brought back
into philosophical view Kant’s so-called tran-
scendental arguments.
Strawson’s influence
Strawson’s work influenced a generation of
philosophers who did not work directly on
Kant, but whose work was Kantian in a dis-
tinctive sense. This included the rejection of a
minimal empiricism and a sense-data concep-
tion of experience, the idea of consciousness
and self-consciousness as playing a central
role in philosophy (as opposed to a primary
focus on brain-processes) and a rejection of
scientific reductivism.
There was, for a while, significant interest
in the potential of transcendental arguments.
Like Strawson, and in contrast to the devel-
opment of Kant’s thought by the German
idealists, analytic Kantianism mostly tried
to develop key Kantian ideas without
Kant’s idealism. There was a lot of interest
in exploring the idea of space and time as
central to experience of an objective world,
for example in the work of Gareth Evans,
Quassim Cassam and John Campbell.150
Analytic Kantians often rejected a Cartesian
account of perceptual experience, according
to which the mental states that perception
involves do not require the actual existence
and presence of the objects of perception to
consciousness. In an interesting circle, this
trend in philosophy of perception has come
to influence a number of contemporary
interpreters of Kant.
Reception and Influence
American Kantianism
Two of the towering figures of analytic phi-
losophy in the United States, Wilfrid Sellars
and Hilary Putnam, self-consciously worked
with at least some Kantian ideas. In an excep-
tion to the lack of interest analytic Kantians
had in Kant’s transcendental idealism,
Putnam has produced a variety of positions
which aim to preserve parts of Kant’s tran-
scendental idealism, while rejecting Kant’s
account of the thing in itself. Sellars relates
his work explicitly to Kant in his 1968 book,
Science and Metaphysics: Variations on
Kantian Themes.151 Although firmly a natu-
ralist, Sellars rejected reductive naturalism
and minimal empiricism. While developing
a different response to the problem than
Kant’s, Sellars was concerned with what is
arguably the central problem of Kant’s criti-
cal philosophy: reconciling the perspective-
less, impersonal view of the world presented
to us by science, and, in particular, physics,
and the value-laden view of free, rational
human agents central to morality.
Resolving this apparent conflict has also
been a concern of John McDowell, who is
influenced by Strawson and Sellars, and
explicitly engages with some parts of Kant’s
project, in his Mind and World.152 Like
Sellars, McDowell develops Kantian ideas
in arguing that inner sensory experience can
have no cognitive force in the absence of con-
ceptualization, rejects a minimal empiricism,
and a Cartesian conception of perceptual
experience. McDowell has developed the
Kantian idea of the opposition between intu-
itions (singular mental representations given
to us through the world affecting our senses)
and concepts (general, structured mental rep-
resentations which are essentially constitu-
ents of judgments), and Kant’s famous claim
that ‘intuitions without concepts are blind’,
332
to argue that perceptual experience cannot
present us with objects, and thus have rep-
resentational content, in the absence of the
application of concepts.
Conceptualism has been a popular posi-
tion in analytic philosophy of perception
for some time. More recently, however,
the conceptualist reading of Kant has been
questioned, with some commentators argu-
ing that Kant’s account of intuition needs to
be understood as a kind of non-conceptual
content, and that intuitions present us with
particulars independently of the contribution
of concepts.153
Analytic ethics
While the early analytic programme rejected
metaphysics, metaphysics is a thriving and
central part of contemporary analytic phi-
losophy, with Kantianism featuring as one
strand among many. In contrast, in analytic
ethics, Kantianism is one of the three posi-
tions most focused on, the other two being
utilitarianism and virtue ethics. In the early
analytic movement, which was dominated
by positivism, there was not much interest in
ethics, since there was widespread suspicion
of the status of ethical claims.
Most focus was on semi-sceptical meta-
ethical theories, such as emotivism, and
subsequently, in response, on attempts to
respond to moral sceptics and to the ego-
ist. Since then, however, Kantian ethics has
become a centre of focus in analytic eth-
ics. An important influence in this was the
work of John Rawls.154 Rawls, and some
of his followers, reads Kant from the point
of view of liberalism and constructivism,
but contemporary analytic Kantian ethics
includes many points of view and topics,
including substantial work on Kant’s moral
psychology.155 – LA

Further reading
H.-J. Glock (ed.), Strawson and Kant
(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003).
R. Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of
Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
J. O’Shea, ‘Conceptual connections: Kant
and the twentieth-century analytic
tradition’, in G. Bird (ed.), A Companion
to Kant (Malden, MA/Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2006), pp. 513–526.
R. Stern (ed.), Transcendental Arguments:
Problems and Prospects (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999).
K. Westphal, ‘Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason and analytic philosophy’, in
P. Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), pp. 401–430.
Analytic Approaches
to Kant’s Ethics
Interpretations of Kant’s ethics in the Anglo-
American philosophical tradition have been
very varied in terms of their assessment of
the meaning, value and import of Kant’s cen-
tral contributions to the subject. A number
of issues have been explored but focus on the
nature of Kant’s universalization tests, the
relationship between the different formulas
of the categorical imperative, deontology and
the primacy of the right over the good have,
until relatively recently, been the dominant
topics in the reception of Kant’s ethics by
Anglo-American writers. In relation to these
topics, there have been a consistent set of
questions and problems, some of which have
333
Reception and Influence
produced stable received interpretations and
others which have not.
Kant’s universalization tests
The understanding of Kant’s appeal to univer-
salization tests for the construction of mor-
ally acceptable maxims of action has been
one of the most controversial areas although
Marcus Singer156 arguably succeeded in mak-
ing this topic central to the understanding of
Kant’s ethics at the cost of introducing con-
fusions. Finding a way of characterizing the
test of universalization in such a way that it
both describes something substantively and
yet also does so in such a way as to make a
purely formal process of judgment possible
has proved remarkably difficult. The usual
tendency has been to focus on the examples
Kant gives of moral judgment in the second
part of G, where Kant treats the same four
examples (suicide, promising, cultivation of
talents and beneficence) twice in relation to
two apparently different formulations of the
categorical imperative.
While the application of the test of uni-
versalization is thought in all cases to turn
on the lack of consistency involved in max-
ims that are not truly universalizable there
is nonetheless thought to be a difference
between the first two examples and the sec-
ond two given that while suicide and false
promising are taken to require direct types
of contradiction, the second two examples
of failure to cultivate one’s talents or to act
beneficently are, on the contrary, taken not
to involve such types of contradiction.
The result of the attention to these
examples has been to produce a distinction
between ‘contradiction in conception’ and
‘contradiction in the will’.157 The distinc-
tion between these types of contradiction is
one that requires itself, however, a ground
Reception and Influence
for why agents should view these contradic-
tions as serious. This question in turn leads
to viewing the two types of contradiction as
examples of lack of consistency in relation to
something fundamental but disagreement has
persisted concerning what this fundamental
reference is concerned with. One of the earli-
est ways of understanding it, and one which
has proved resilient, is in relation to purposes
by means of a teleological law of consistency
of purposes. A version of this was first pro-
moted by Herbert Paton158 and appeal to
such a notion also featured in Bruce Aune’s
work159 but, in relation at least to the con-
tradiction in conception test, has been chal-
lenged, not least by Richard Galvin.160
The contradiction in conception test has
been more generally understood as involv-
ing notions of either practical contradiction
or logical contradiction. The practical con-
tradiction view, like the teleological con-
tradiction view, does involve reference to
purposes but, unlike the teleological contra-
diction view, abstracts these from nature and
relates them solely to the agent’s intentions.
However, as Christine Korsgaard admits, a
lot then depends on how the statement of
maxims is given and this makes the practi-
cal contradiction view controversial.161 This
problem of the determination of the maxim
afflicts even the logical contradiction test
and the latter has the further problem of not
obviously offering substantive material for
moral judgments.162
If the contradiction in conception test is
controversial, the contradiction in the will
test has appeared more appealing due to its
more substantive appearance.163 One of the
reasons for this is clearly because the contra-
diction in the will test is connected to Kant’s
formula of humanity with the reference to
persons as ends in themselves, a reference
often taken to be one of the most generally
334
important parts of Kant’s ethics.164 However,
this does also resurrect questions about the
kind of teleological appeal that might be
involved in Kant’s ethics, albeit without the
reference to ‘nature’ that Paton appeared to
import being required.165
Further, some have objected that such a
reference to ‘purposes’ in Kant requires him
to affirm a conception of value that is inher-
ently at odds with the Kantian approach.166
The problem of asserting the contradiction in
the will test over the contradiction in concep-
tion test thus concerns the way it appears to
affect the understanding of the general struc-
ture of Kant’s moral theory and this shows
that the discussion over the understanding of
the universalization tests cannot be viewed in
isolation from the assessment of the mean-
ing and import of the distinct formulas of the
categorical imperative.
The formulas of the categorical imperative
Since Paton there has been a sustained dis-
pute concerning how many formulations
of the categorical imperative Kant presents
in G, with Paton suggesting that there were
five separate formulas although Kant him-
self appears to indicate there are only three.
If much of the controversy concerning uni-
versalization has been based on the appeal
to examples that Kant makes in the second
part of G, the same work presents, allegedly,
some other formulas that Kant does not con-
nect to examples or therefore use in practical
assessment of actions. Some commentators
have, in fact, rejected the general conten-
tion that it is the point of the categorical
imperative to be used in practical assessment
of actions167 but this kind of view tends to
be based mainly on an intuitionist view of
ethics (such as was classically given by W.D.
Ross168).

While this type of reading of Kant’s ethics
has been revived in recent years169 it remains
a minority response to Kant, not least because
it is a clear revisionary reaction to his work
that undermines any justificatory appeal
of the categorical imperative in ethics.170 If
such a view is not to be adopted, however,
there remains the need to account for Kant’s
appeal to notions such as the ‘kingdom of
ends’ and ‘autonomy’ in his discussion of
the categorical imperative. In accounting for
this, it is possible to take the former notion
as part of the overall work of ethics171 while
the latter idea, as central to Kant’s general
view of freedom, can, by contrast, be argued
to unite a number of disparate themes in
Kant’s philosophy.172 The general problem
of how to think the relationship between the
formulas overall has, however, certainly not
been solved.173
Deontology and the priority of the right
The general view of Kant’s ethics which until
recently was the received interpretation is
that it is a form of deontology that asserts the
priority of the right over the good. In order
to explain both this interpretation and the
challenges that have recently been presented
to it, however, it is necessary to indicate the
distinction that exists between deontology as
a general claim and the assertion of the prior-
ity of the right over the good as a specifica-
tion of it.
Samuel Freeman has articulated this dis-
tinction in terms of the parts of moral theory
stating that there is a distinction between the
content of its principles, the means of justi-
fying them and the ways in which the prin-
ciples are applied. According to Freeman,
deontology is a thesis concerning the content
of moral principles, while the conception of
the priority of the right over the good with
335
Reception and Influence
which it is often confused concerns instead
the justification of principles and the account
of their application is meant to describe how
the principles justified will be connected to
given matters.174
The point of this distinction is to suggest
that deontologists are committed to a plural-
ist conception of the good while the assertion
of the priority of the right is meant to show a
procedure for constraining the way in which
heterogeneous goods can be related to thus
providing us with an understanding of which
goods are permissible.175 Viewed in this way
the key point for normative ethics is not so
much deontology itself (which emerges as a
meta-ethical thesis on this view) as the prior-
ity of the right over the good.
Recent writers have subjected the attribu-
tion to Kant of deontology to some critical
scrutiny with Barbara Herman176 using Kant’s
claims about the good will in the first part
of G to argue for a view of rational agency
as containing an ultimate internal condition
that we have to value. On Herman’s view,
there is a need for a ‘grounding’ conception
of value in order to account for the right-
making characteristics of action and to give
motivational force to moral conduct.
Paul Guyer, in contrast to Herman, tends
to conflate deontology with the priority of
the right over the good as Guyer takes deon-
tological theories to require a constraint of
the good by the right.177 This runs into the
problem that, when discussing the ‘fact of
reason’ in CPrR, Kant clearly asserts the need
for the good to be determined after the moral
law and through it (CPrR 63). In response,
Guyer stresses the notion that freedom is the
locus of value for Kant and that the notion of
autonomy incorporates both the notions of
value and duty. However, Guyer’s interpreta-
tion is clearly revisionist in requiring rejec-
tion of Kant’s argument in CPrR in favour
Reception and Influence
of the appeal to the good will in G though
the value of this good will is still found in
freedom.
The most radical challenge to the concep-
tion of Kantian deontology comes, however,
not from Herman or Guyer but rather from
David Cummiskey, who articulates a case for
‘Kantian consequentialism’.178 Cummiskey’s
view, like Guyer’s, is explicitly revisionist
since it is not here the claim that Kant him-
self was a consequentialist but rather that a
consistently worked-out normative theory of
the Kantian type will be consequentialist even
though Kant’s ‘foundational’ theory is not
consequentialist. The point of Cummiskey’s
interpretation is to present the ‘foundational’
theory of Kant as involving formalism and
the derivation of the categorical imperative
(or the content of his principles on Freeman’s
view), the normative theory, by contrast, as
the place where the justification is provided
and this justification is taken by Cummiskey
to be amenable to consequentialist interpre-
tation. Although Cummiskey’s interpretation
is certainly controversial,179 it is far from
alone in articulating a view of Kant that
makes his ethics amenable to consequential-
ist readings.180
These successive challenges to the
received interpretation of Kant’s ethics
have not gone without challenge and there
is a series of gradations that have led to the
consequentialist reading since Guyer earlier
suggested a kind of maximization involved
in Kant’s ethics, at least with regard to free-
dom. The denial of a place in ethical theory
for this thesis of maximization is part of
the understanding of deontology, at least
on John Rawls’ influential (and arguably
Kantian) view.181
However, Rawls’ commitment to the
notion of ‘primary goods’ does seem to
contravene deontology as understood on
336
Herman’s construal since it allows for a
notion of value independently of the sim-
ple appeal to willing. Similarly, Andrews
Reath, in his defence of the priority of the
right over the good, does allow for value
commitments to be brought into pure prac-
tical reason which appears to contravene
deontology positively understood.182 Reath,
however, rejects the appeal to the good will
as a source of value183 on the grounds that
what makes the good will good is only its
conformity to law.
Moral agency
The dispute concerning deontology and the
priority of the right shows further strains
over how to combine Kant’s formalism with a
moral content that has substantive force and
the formalist readings of Kant have tended to
appeal consistently to the sense that the only
‘good’ available on Kantian premises con-
cerns conformity to law. In some sense, this
conformity to law is clearly central to Kant’s
general normative theory though the basis of
it as a picture of rational agency requires a
response to questions about the structure of
reasons for action.184
Such responses have been forthcoming,
notably in Korsgaard185 but these defences
have tended to be open to objection both
by those committed to a stronger form of
externalist view186 and by those who want
to articulate a more clearly psychologis-
tic view of Kant generally.187 There are
also defences of Kant’s view that are more
strongly metaphysical than Korsgaard sug-
gests.188 The relationship of Kant’s moral
psychology to these general problems is
surely at present under-developed, not least
because, as Gary Banham189 pointed out in
some detail, the general topic of Kantian
moral psychology has been, until recently,

neglected despite its significance in the
Doctrine of Virtue.
A ‘wider’ view of Kant’s ethics
As my stress thus far has shown, the general
nature of the focus on Kantian ethics has
tended to be based on the interpretation of
G with only passing attention to CPrR.190
The reasons for this restrictive focus have
included the lack of provision, until recently,
of English editions of a number of Kant’s
works though Mary Gregor191 was pioneer-
ing in her attention to MM. Focus upon
MM brings with it attention to both Kant’s
philosophy of right and a concern with his
relation to contemporary virtue ethics.
The former belongs to Kant’s political phi-
losophy, which has recently been treated to
evaluations that make evident its difference
from contemporary political philosophy192
and which provide both reconstructive atten-
tion to his view of public right193 and to his
relation to the traditions of jurisprudence.194
However, it is arguable that the task of relat-
ing the political philosophy more closely to
the general picture of Kant’s practical phi-
losophy is, as yet, in its infancy with system-
atic relations between the supreme principle
of right and the categorical imperative still
unresolved.
The view of Kant’s virtue ethics is, likewise,
still in process of formation with attention
to duties to oneself,195 humility196 and virtue
in general197 only recently available. There
is, further, as yet, no systematic study of the
entirety of MM from the analytic tradition.
Due to these lacunae, it is evident that ana-
lytic treatment of Kantian ethics has much
work left to do but the debates within it are
notable both for their seriousness and for the
degree of attention to detail they commonly
involve. – GB
337
Reception and Influence
Further reading
R. Dean, The Value of Humanity in
Kant’s Moral Theory (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006).
P. Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and
Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
T. Hill (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Kant’s
Ethics (Malden, MA/Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009).
C. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of
Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996).
A. Wood, Kantian Ethics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Kantian Normativity in Rawls,
Korsgaard and Continental
Practical Philosophy
Aside from the scholarly discussions con-
cerning the interpretation of Kant’s ethical
writings, Kant’s ethics has exerted a major
influence upon twentieth century philosophy
in the broadly analytic tradition. These range
from innovations in the way the history of
ethics and meta-ethics informs contempo-
rary ethical debates to the development of
substantial theories of practical normativ-
ity. Here, we focus upon the figures of John
Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel
and Christine Korsgaard.
Korsgaard (I)
One of Korsgaard’s contributions to contem-
porary analytic ethics has been to provide an
interpretation of Kant’s ethics which views
its analysis of obligation as the culmination
of a historical progression involving several
Reception and Influence
traditions (which continue into the twentieth
century). In analyzing the question of why
there are moral obligations,198 she first dis-
tinguishes the ‘voluntarist’ tradition (Hobbes,
Pufendorf) for which obligations result from
a legislator’s will and the contract binding
agents to it. The realist tradition (Clarke,
Price, Moore, Prichard, Nagel) she presents
as responding originally to the regress arising
from the further question of what makes such
a contract with the legislator binding. More
generally, it would seem that whatever answer
is given to the normative question, it leads to
such a regress insofar as whatever grounds
are provided, their normative force can be
questioned. To avoid scepticism about moral
obligation, the realist draws such questioning
to a close by appealing to moral properties as
real features of the world whose normativity
is intrinsic.
Additionally, according to Korsgaard,
there is a third tradition which can be
traced back to Hume, and includes Bernard
Williams (and to an extent Bentham and
Mill) for which the proper way to address
scepticism is to show how moral values are
endorsed under different points of view
(e.g. self-interest, human flourishing). If
such ‘reflective endorsement’199 can be used
to give an account of why there is moral
obligation in general, it is not sufficient to
explain why one is morally obligated in
any particular case of decision-making.
This is where Kant’s notion of autonomy is
required. Korsgaard interprets Kant’s con-
cept of normativity as defined in terms of
endorsement by the reflecting self-conscious
agent. This identifies normative reasons as
laws of the agent’s freedom. And, going
somewhat beyond Kant, she argues that the
kind of laws that are normative for an agent
as those which define the agent’s practical
conception of herself.
338
If this places Kant’s ethics in a tradition of
reflective endorsement ethics, it also shows
him to be a voluntarist, with the source of
obligation lying in the agent’s own will; and
it identifies moral commands as intrinsically
normative as the realist has it.
Aside from this original work on Kant’s
place among different traditions in eth-
ics, Korsgaard’s reconstruction of Kant’s
foundational claims arguably enables us
to understand how Kant’s ethics informed
the development of new ethical theories in
the twentieth century.200 In her attempt to
reconstruct the Kantian grounding of eth-
ics, Korsgaard finds that Kant’s appeal
to the fact of reason proof (CPrR 47) can
only work if the ‘highest good’ is given as
a goal of rationality, together with the con-
ception of moral law, as a fact of reason.201
This notion of the highest good is too thick
a teleological notion to meet with universal
assent. Apparently no other notion is avail-
able to Kant to play an analogous ground-
ing role, since he draws exclusively upon
the content of rationality. This suggests that
with some transformation of the content of
Kant’s ethical principles, minimal grounding
assumptions (‘thicker’ than mere rational-
ity) that meet with universal assent could be
sought.
This provides one way of interpret-
ing important developments in twentieth-
­century practical philosophy in the Kantian
tradition. Rawls, on the one hand, and Apel
and Habermas, on the other, have sought to
construct frameworks for universal norma-
tive practical principles which are directly
inspired by Kant. These authors appeal to
some constructive process to generate the
principles that all agents will take as binding.
In so doing, they replace the grounding role
of Kantian teleological assumptions either
with universal desires (Rawls) or non-moral

normative constraints (Apel and Habermas)
that underpin the constructive process.
John Rawls
Rawls distances himself from Kant insofar as
he views the test of the Formula of Universal
Law (the CI test) as rejecting the maxim of
charity in the same way as it rejects the maxim
of universal egoism, i.e. because of a contra-
diction in the will.202 That is, insofar as Rawls
takes ‘willing’ to mean ‘wanting’, he argues
that one could not will to be committed to a
maxim of charity that would conflict with the
pursuit of our other ends. This leads to a con-
cern with moral scepticism, i.e. a threat to the
normative force of moral laws.203
To generate morally binding principles,
Rawls injects the notion of willing with ‘true
human needs’, which are taken to define
wants that are universally valid for human
beings.204 This follows from Rawls’s claim
that mere rational willing will not suffice
to generate principles: the agents’ desires
and priorities must be taken into account.
This thickening of the agent to include true
human needs has the advantage of transform-
ing the test procedures using the Formula of
Universal Law into the making of rational
choices committed to securing these basic
needs.205 This involves a move away from
Kant’s formal tests, which reflects Rawls’s
uneasiness with the formal and a priori
aspects of Kant’s ethics.206
Rawls’s solution for an impartial form of
rational choice is to consider an a-historical
ideal situation, the original situation, from
which we can decide which kind of social
contract would produce a fair and just soci-
ety. This situation is characterized by an igno-
rance of the particular features of the agents
involved in the decision-making, as well as of
their place in the future social arrangements.
339
Reception and Influence
For Rawls, the question about what is fair
must be agreed upon in this ideal state.207
And this notion of fairness will then define
normative constraints. This approach defines
an important strand in twentieth-century
practical philosophy, contractualism.208
The Rawlsian notion of ‘ideal state’ is
however not unproblematic. Much as Rawls
seeks to thicken the rational agent to take
into account wants and priorities, the way
these essential needs are identified could be
questioned. That is, insofar as Rawls aban-
dons Kant’s notion of rational agent, what
is taken as legitimately defining agents’ true
human needs will have an impact upon deci-
sion-making in the ideal state.
A corresponding problem arguably arises
for the very notion of person which replaces
Kant’s rational agent. For instance, Nozick
argues that if we are to distribute benefits and
burdens among agents, this assumes bounda-
ries between persons and assets are clearly
defined.209 These are however not given, and
potentially difficult to draw insofar as real
individuals are always already found with
assets. As soon as persons as properly situ-
ated, i.e. with certain assets, are considered,
there is no reason why this existing distri-
bution of assets should meet with general
assent. The apparently neutral idea of a fair
decision in an ideal situation as definitive of
a normative conception of justice can there-
fore be questioned because it does not prop-
erly represent the situatedness of the agents
and how this might affect what they take to
be their true human needs. It is therefore not
clear how Rawls’s proposal can in fact lead
to a consensus.
Apel and Habermas
The notion of an ideal process generating
principles that would be binding for those
Reception and Influence
involved in this process also underpins Apel’s
and Habermas’s work.210 They require that
an ideal discussion between all members of a
society provide the grounds upon which deci-
sions will be made as to what rules the par-
ticipants will then be bound by. The question
again is whether the starting points of these
approaches are uncontroversial and there-
fore are appropriate for the task of ground-
ing ethical obligations. That is why Apel and
Habermas try to minimize the assumptions
their discourse ethics rely upon to a set of
basic claims about communication.
In particular, Apel thus discusses a tran-
scendental grounding for his ethics: the
conditions of the ideal discussion are pre-
supposed by everyday argumentative dis-
course.211 Apel takes over from Habermas
four validity claims defining the ideal con-
ditions of human discourse. These are that
meaning, truth, truthfulness and normative
correctness are features of our everyday dis-
course, which human beings accept insofar as
they are members of a linguistic community.
Whenever someone speaks, he aims to utter
something meaningful. Some truth claim(s) is
(are) also involved, either directly, or through
the assumptions made by the speaker. At
some point in the communicative exchange,
there must be something that one assumes
represents what the speaker believes to be
true, i.e. where the speaker exhibits truth-
fulness. In communicating with others, the
speaker appeals to a shared sense of validity,
which defines a normative correctness.
For Apel, these claims are necessarily
universal.212 Apel is thus in effect replacing
Kant’s transcendental subject with the con-
sideration of an ideal communication com-
munity. Against Rorty, he argues that if one
were to contravene any of the features of
discourse that he and Habermas identify in
their validity claims, one would be involved
340
in a performative self-contradiction. For
Apel, these validity claims thus identify
transcendental-pragmatic conditions of
argumentation.
Apel takes these claims further than
Habermas, as he argues that insofar as a
speaker takes it as a normative constraint
that he is able to justify the claims he makes
to his interlocutors, normative correctness
thereby grounds ethical normativity.213 And
Apel adds that this normativity binds the
speaker insofar as he seeks the consensus
not only of his language community, but also
of the whole community of mankind.214 For
Apel, such transcendental reflection takes
us further than the problem of grounding
ethical normativity. It can also enable us to
formulate moral norms. In particular, Apel
formulates his own substitute for Kant’s for-
mula of universal law.215
Such a proposal for an overhaul of
Kantian ethics can be criticized on Kantian
grounds,216 but also on systematic grounds.
Habermas thinks that rules which are inher-
ent to discourse and argumentation cannot
be claimed to be valid for action beyond dis-
course.217 He therefore does not adhere to
Apel’s programme for a strong grounding of
ethics that characterizes Apel’s transcenden-
tal-pragmatic approach.
For Habermas, a weaker grounding can
be achieved by noting that there are univer-
sal pragmatic presuppositions of speech acts
resulting from the agent’s know-how. Such
presuppositions can be identified through
empirical enquiry. It is not clear however why,
given the different ways in which these pre-
suppositions can be characterized, an investi-
gation into these presuppositions should give
rise to universally valid ethical norms.
If Apel’s proposal for grounding ethical
normativity in one’s belonging to a language
community is thus taken to task by Habermas

for an unwarranted exportation of normativ-
ity of human discourse into the realm of the
practical, it may be worth exploring whether
this normativity cannot be understood in a
deeper sense as a feature of rational agency,
and thus inherent both to discourse and to
practical decision-making.
Korsgaard (II)
Korsgaard makes a move along these lines,
by drawing upon the notion of reflective
endorsement which places rational dis-
course at the heart of practical decision
making. As we saw above, her account
of the historical position of Kantian eth-
ics leads to viewing it as the culmination
of a tradition of reflective endorsement.
Normativity for Korsgaard lies in the
endorsement by the self-reflecting agent.
To get from here to obligation, Korsgaard
makes three moves.
The first is closely connected to Kant’s
argument for the Formula of Humanity.
Korsgaard argues that, insofar as one val-
ues anything at all, one must thereby value
the source of such values, namely oneself as
a human being. Recognizing that this gives
us no obligations towards others, she does
not attempt to move from self-interested rea-
sons to concern for others. Rather, she draws
upon Wittgenstein’s private language argu-
ment to argue for the publicity of reasons:
there are, for Korsgaard, no private reasons
that could not be translated into a communi-
cable form. And the third step consists in fol-
lowing Nagel’s lead in arguing that another’s
reasons will therefore feature in my practical
thinking and define obligations insofar as the
other is thereby recognized as a person like
me.218
Even if we accept the Wittgensteinian
move at the heart of Korsgaard’s argument,
341
Reception and Influence
it is not clear how much can be achieved by
such a line of reasoning. Her first move is
a transcendental argument which establishes
that the value of humanity must feature in
my decision-making. Her argument is that, if
I value X, and X can be described as a par-
tial ‘consequence’ of Y, then I am obligated
to value Y also.
Although this argument has been chal-
lenged,219 another worry is that it is not clear
how Korsgaard can account for the nor-
mative force of ethical commands. Cohen
points to what he calls, after Hobbes, the
problem of the sovereign.220 Although the
sovereign is bound by the laws he makes,
he can alter these laws. It would there-
fore seem that if the source of normativity
for Korsgaard is human, then she has no
answer to this problem. And indeed, when
she identifies the sense of one’s practical
identity as defining normative constraints
for an agent, what is apparently lacking is
something like Kant’s appeal to a faculty
of reason at the transcendental level as the
only way of binding the agent. For Kant,
in the moral realm, we are subjects rather
than sovereigns (CPrR 82). To these criti-
cisms, Korsgaard responds that a legislat-
ing agent cannot alter the law at will, since
universality constraints apply.221
This claim relies upon accepting that she
can derive universality constraints from her
minimal premises. Her interesting detailed
account of this claim draws upon an under-
standing of the agent as wanting to see him-
self as having a causally effective will.222 This
is at the heart of the agent’s sense of identity.
This view however amounts to endorsing a
teleological premise in which a proto-exis-
tentialist pursuit of an agent’s identity is sub-
stituted for the role played by the pursuit of
the highest good in her earlier reconstruction
of Kant’s fact of reason proof.
Reception and Influence
Korsgaard’s introduction of the agent’s
practical identity is a key development of
Kantian ethics that takes account of stand-
ard criticisms of its alienating features
(Hegel, Williams) by absorbing some of
the tradition of reflective endorsement eth-
ics. What it shares with Rawls, Habermas
and Apel’s approaches is a rejection of
Kant’s alleged formalism and the meta-
physical commitments of his notion of the
a priori. This tradition of Kantian ethics is
thus largely divorced from the investigation
of transcendental idealism as an alterna-
tive to naturalism. This may make it more
attractive to many, but one might wonder
with Cohen whether, ‘if morality is merely
human, then it is optional as far as rational-
ity is concerned’.223 – CO
Further reading
K.-O. Apel, ‘Discourse ethics, democracy,
and international law: Toward a
globalization of practical reason’,
American Journal of Economics and
Sociology 66,1 (2007): 49–70.
K. Baynes, The Normative Grounds of
Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls and
Habermas (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
1992).
P. Gilabert, ‘Considerations on the notion
of moral validity in the moral theories of
Kant and Habermas’, Kant-Studien 97,2
(2006): 210–227.
O. O’Neill, ‘Constructivism in Rawls and
Kant’, in S. Freeman, The Cambridge
Companion to Rawls (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002),
pp. 347–367.
A. Wellmer, ‘Ethics and dialogue: Elements
of moral judgment in Kant and discourse
ethics’, in A. Wellmer, The Persistence
of Modernity, trans. D. Midgley
342
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991),
pp. 113–231.
Notes
J. Schultz, Exposition of Kant’s Critique of
1
Pure Reason [incl. Schultz’s review of ID],
trans. and ed. J. C. Morrison (Ottawa, 1995),
p. 169 [hereafter referred to as Exposition].
2
J. Schultz, Exposition, pp. 168–169.
3
M. Herz, Betrachtungen aus der speculativen
Weltweisheit (Königsberg, 1771), p. 66 [hereaf-
ter referred to as Betrachtungen]; all transla-
tions from this text are my own.
4
M. Herz, Betrachtungen, p. 74.
5
See Hamann’s letter of 8 December 1783 to
Herder, in J. G. Hamann, Briefwechsel, ed. W.
Ziesemer, A. Henkel (Wiesbaden, 1955–1957),
pp. v, 107.
6
B. Sassen (ed.), Kant’s Early Critics: The
Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical
Philosophy (Cambridge, 2000), p. 61.
7
B. Sassen, Kant’s Early Critics, p. 59.
8
B. Sassen, Kant’s Early Critics, p. 60.
9
Kant thus refers to Garve’s claim that ‘neither
the concepts of space and time, nor the catego-
ries combined with them, are particular to the
conditions of alertness and sensation in which
alone we assume existing objects; we can find
them also in novels, fantasies, and dreams,
even in the fantasies of the insane. Whenever
we dream, we see what is represented [. . .] in
accord with the laws of our spirit, and yet we
do not in the end recognise it as actual’ (B.
Sassen, Kant’s Early Critics, p. 76).
10
B. Sassen, Kant’s Early Critics, pp. 53–54.
11
Kant interprets Berkeley as a ‘Platonist’ or
‘enthusiast’ who claims that ‘all cognition
through the senses and experience is nothing
but sheer illusion, and there is truth only in
the ideas of pure understanding and reason’,
and shows that such a claim is diametrically
opposed to CPR’s conclusion that ‘[a]ll
cognition of things out of mere pure under-
standing or pure reason is nothing but sheer
illusion, and there is truth only in experi-
ence’ (P 374).
12
In the 1781 edition, Hume is not mentioned at
all until ‘The Discipline of Pure Reason’.
 Reception and Influence

13
F. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German
Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge,
1987), p. 38.
14
See J. G. Hamann, Sämtliche Werke:
Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. J. Nadler
(Vienna, 1949–1957), vol. III, p. 279 [hereafter
referred to as HKA]. All translations are my
own.
15
See Hamann, HKA, p. 278.
16
Hamann, HKA, p. 283.
17
Hamann, HKA, p. 284.
18
Hamann, HKA, p. 286.
19
Hamann, HKA, p. 288.
20
Hamann, HKA, p. 285.
21
See Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Beyträge
zur leichtern Uebersicht des Zustandes
der Philosophie beym Anfange des 19.
Jahrhunderts (Hamburg, 1801), vol. I,
pp. 206–212.
22
Reinhold, Über das Fundament des philoso-
phischen Wissens, ed. W. Schrader (Hamburg,
1978), p. 71 [hereafter referred to as Über das
Fundament]. All translations are my own.
23
Reinhold, Über das Fundament, p. 72.
24
Reinhold, Über das Fundament, pp. 74–75.
25
Reinhold, Beiträge zur Berichtigung
­bisheriger Mißverständnisse der Philosophen.
Erster Band, das Fundament der
Elementarphilosophie betreffend, ed.
F. Fabbianelli (Hamburg, 2003), pp. 98–99,
and 113 respectively. See also Reinhold, Über
das Fundament, pp. 77–78.
26
Reinhold, Über das Fundament, pp. 82–83.
27
See Reinhold, Beiträge zur Berichtigung,
p. 233.
28
See further the essay ‘Kantianism in the 1790s:
from Reinhold to Hegel’, this volume.
29
Maimon, Gesammelte Werke (Hildesheim,
1965–1976), vol. II, p. 432 [hereafter referred
to as GW followed by volume and page num-
bers]. All translations are my own.
30
See Maimon, GW, pp. 64–65.
31
See Reinhold, Beiträge zur Berichtigung, p. 199.
32
Ibid.
33
Maimon, GW, vol. II, pp. 178–179.
34
Maimon, GW, vol. V, pp. 473–475.
35
Maimon, GW, vol. V, pp. 470 and 490–491.
36
Maimon, GW, vol. V, p. 490.
37
Maimon, GW, vol. V, 495–496.
38
See Maimon, GW, vol. II, pp. 187–188.
39
Maimon, GW, vol. II, p. 371.
40
Maimon, GW, vol. II, p. 372.
41
Maimon, GW, vol. II, p. 215. This claim sits
uncomfortably alongside Maimon’s conclu-
sion to his later Versuch einer neuen Logik (see
Maimon, GW, vol. V, pp. 495–496).
42
See Maimon, GW, vol. II, pp. 215–217
and 372.
43
See Maimon, GW, vol. II, pp. 363–364.
44
Maimon, GW, vol. II, p. 64.
45
Maimon, GW, vol. II, pp. 415–416.
46
Maimon, GW, vol. II, p. 355.
47
See Maimon, GW, vol. II, pp. 355–356.
48
Maimon, GW, vol. II, p. 82.
49
Maimon, GW, vol. II, p. 32.
50
See F. H. Jacobi, Werke (Darmstadt, 1968–
1980), vol. II, pp. 301–302. All translations are
my own.
51
Jacobi, Werke, vol. II, pp. 303–304.
52
Jacobi, Werke, vol. II, pp. 307–310.
53
Jacobi, Werke, vol. II, p. 304.
54
Jacobi, Werke, vol. II, p. 307.
55
See G. E. Schulze, Aenesidemus oder über
der von Herrn Professor Reinhold in Jena
gelieferten Elementarphilosophie: Nebst
einer Verteidigung des Skeptizismus gegen die
Anmaßungen der Vernunftkritik, ed. M. Frank
(Hamburg, 1996), p. 183 [hereafter referred to
as Aenesidemus]. All translations are my own.
56
See Schulze, Aenesidemus, p. 184.
57
Schulze thus writes that ‘as long as the exist-
ence of [things in themselves] is uncertain, we
are unable to decide anything about whether
that which we experience in our present life
constitutes more than a mere illusion’ (Schulze,
Aenesidemus, p. 259).
58
Schulze, Aenesidemus, p. 263–264.
59
F. W. J. Schelling, Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe
(Stuttgart, 1976–), vol. IV, p. 102 [hereafter
referred to as HKA]. All translations are my
own.
60
Schelling, HKA, vol. IV, p. 90–92.
61
Schelling, HKA, vol. IV, p. 82. From his accom-
panying remarks – see e.g. Schelling, HKA,
vol. IV, p. 91 – it is clear that Schelling has
Reinhold’s version of the critical philosophy
very much within his sights.
62
Schelling, HKA, vol. IV, p. 73. For Maimon’s
related claims see Maimon, GW, vol. V,
p. 435.
63
Schelling, HKA, vol. IV, p. 73.
64
Schelling, HKA, vol. IV, pp. 78–79.

343
Reception and Influence
65
Maimon, GW, vol. V, p. 479.
66
Schelling, HKA, vol. IV, p. 73.
67
Schelling, HKA, vol. IV, p. 74.
68
Schelling, HKA, vol. IV, p. 75.
69
Schelling, HKA, vol. IV, p. 85.
70
Schelling, HKA, vol. IV, p. 87.
71
Cf. H. Schröpfer, Kants Weg in die
Öffentlichkeit. Christian Gottfried Schütz
als Wegbereiter der kritischen Philosophie
(Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 2003).
72
Cf. my ‘Einleitung’, chs 3 and 4 in K. L.
Reinhold, Versuch einer neuen Theorie des
menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens, vol. 1
(Hamburg, 2010).
73
An English translation has recently appeared
under the title New Theory of the Human
Capacity for Representation, trans. and ed. T.
Mehigan, B. Empson (Berlin/New York, 2010).
74
D. Henrich (ed.), Immanuel Carl Diez,
Briefwechsel und Kantische Schriften.
Wissensbegründung in der Glaubenskrise
Tübingen – Jena (1790–1792) (Stuttgart,
1997), p. 176.
75
Cf. the report by Leutwein in D. Henrich,
‘Leutwein über Hegel. Ein Dokument zu
Hegels Biographie’, in Hegel-Studien 3 (1965):
39–77.
76
Cf. M. Brecht, ‘Die Anfänge der idealistischen
Philosophie und die Rezeption Kants in
Tübingen (1788–1795)’, in H. Decker-Hauff
(ed.), 500 Jahre Eberhard-Karls-Universität
Tübingen. Beiträge zur Geschichte der
Universität Tübingen 1477–1977 (Tübingen,
1977), pp. 381–428.
77
J. F. Flatt, Briefe über den moralischen
Erkenntnisgrund der Religion überhaupt, und
besonders in Beziehung auf die Kantische
Philosophie (Tübingen, 1789), pp. 16 and 72
respectively.
78
Schelling, HKA, vol. III/1, p. 16. That
this does not refer to the teachers in
the Stift is shown by M. Franz, ‘Johann
Friedrich Flatts philosophisch-theologische
Auseinandersetzung mit Kant’, in ». . . an
der Galeere der Theologie«? Hölderlins,
Hegels und Schellings Philosophiestudium
an der Universität Tübingen, ed. M. Franz,
in the series Schriften der Hölderlin-
Gesellschaft, Bd. 23/3 (Tübingen, 2007),
pp. 189–222.
79
Schelling, HKA, vol. II, pp. 19, 21.
344
80
G. C. Rapp, ‘Ueber die moralischen
Triebfedern, besonders die der christlichen
Religion’, in Allgemeines Repertorium für
empirische Psychologie und verwandte
Wissenschaften, ed. I. D. Mauchart, vol. 1,
continued in vol. 2 (1792), pp. 130–156 and
133–220 [hereafter referred to as ‘Ueber die
moralischen Triebfedern’]. Hegel’s occupa-
tion with this essay is attested to by his letter
on Christmas Eve, 1794 to Schelling; see
Schelling, HKA, vol. III/1, p. 14.
81
K. L. Reinhold, Letters on the Kantian
Philosophy, ed. K. Ameriks (Cambridge, 2005),
p. 33.
82
Rapp, ‘Ueber die moralischen Triebfedern’,
p. 151.
83
G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, vol. 1: Frühe Schriften
(Frankfurt a/M, 1971, 1986), pp. 359–360;
trans. in T. M. Knox (ed.), Early Theological
Writings (Philadelphia 1971, 1996), p. 244.
84
Cf. my ‘Hegel zwischen Fichte und der
Tübinger Fichte-Kritik’, in C. Krijnen, D. H.
Heidemann (eds), Hegel und die Geschichte
der Philosophie (Darmstadt, 2007), pp.
171–190. Storrian theology is not a branch of
such orthodoxy, as has been made clear in M.
Franz, ‘’Tübinger Orthodoxie’. Ein Feindbild
der jungen Schelling und Hegel’, in S. Dietzsch,
G. F. Frigo (eds), Vernunft und Glauben. Ein
philosophischer Dialog der Moderne mit dem
Christentum (Berlin, 2006), pp. 141–160.
85
Schelling, HKA, vol. III/1, p. 19.
86
See Hegel, Differenz des Fichteschen und
Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie, in
Hauptwerke, vol. 1 (Hamburg, 1999), p. 5
[hereafter referred to as Differenzschrift];
trans. W. Cerf, H. Harris, The Difference
between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of
Philosophy (Albany, 1977), p. 79 [hereafter
referred to as Difference].
87
Hegel, Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur
Philosophie, in Hauptwerke, vol. 1, p. 223
[hereafter referred to as Skeptizismus]; all
translations of this essay are my own.
88
Hegel, Glauben und Wissen, in Hauptwerke,
vol. 1, p. 326; trans. W. Cerf, H. S. Harris,
Faith and Knowledge (Albany, 1977), p. 69.
89
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences
in Basic Outline, §40 [hereafter referred to as
Encyclopaedia]; all translations of this work
are my own.
 Reception and Influence

90
Hegel, Encyclopaedia, §41. ‘absoluteness’ and ‘certainty’ (p. 13) he was
91
Hegel, Glauben und Wissen, p. 326; Faith and convinced, Liebmann wrote at the end of each
Knowledge, p. 68; translation amended. chapter: ‘Hence, we must return to Kant [Also
92
Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. G. di Giovanni muß auf Kant zurückgegangen werden].’
(Cambridge, 2010), p. 515. 113
The influence of Kantian thought can be
93
Hegel, Differenzschrift, p. 6; Difference, p. 80. found in post-Kantian German Idealism, in
94
Hegel, Skeptizismus, p. 223. the work of J. F. Fries, J. F. Herbart, R. H.
95
Hegel, Skeptizismus, p. 224. Lotze, E. Laas, R. Avenarius and E. Mach,
96
Hegel, Differenzschrift, p. 5; Difference, p. 80. in W. Dilthey, K. Jaspers and M. Heidegger,
97
For a detailed account of Schopenhauer’s the Frankfurt School, the transcendental
disillusionment with Fichte’s philosophy, see pragmatics of K.-O. Apel, and even in post-
R. Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild modern philosophers like J.-F. Lyotard and M.
Years of Philosophy, trans. E. Osers (London, Foucault.
1989), ch. 8. 114
See K. de Boer, Thinking in the Light of Time.
98
A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Heidegger’s Encounter with Hegel (Albany,
Representation, volume I, trans. and ed. J. NY, 2000) for an interpretation of Being and
Norman et al. (Cambridge, 2010), p. 443, Time and related texts that focuses on the
henceforth WWR I. issue of temporality.
99
See The Fourfold Root of the Principle 115
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of
of Sufficient Reason, Chapter 5; WWR I: Metaphysics, trans. R. Taft (Bloomington,
Section 3. 1990, 1997), p. 201/140 [hereafter referred
100
WWR I: Sections 10–11. to as KPM]; the page references are to the
101
WWR I: 444. English translation and the original German
102
WWR I: 535. edition respectively, separated by a slash.
103
For a clear account of these two interpreta- 116
cf. KPM 21/15, 32/22.
tions of transcendental idealism see A. Wood, 117
KPM 20/14.
Kant (Malden, MA, 2005), ch. 4. 118
KPM 16–17/11.
104
WWR I: 138. 119
KPM 16/10.
105
The World as Will and Representation, vol- 120
KPM 11/7.
ume II, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York, 1966), 121
KPM 15/10; cf. 125/88.
p. 197. 122
KPM 145/102; cf. 51/36.
106
WWR I: 135–6. 123
KPM 25/18.
107
For a full argument for this interpretation see 124
KPM 22/15.
my ‘Poetic intuition and the bounds of sense: 125
KPM 24/17.
metaphor and metonymy in Schopenhauer’s 126
KPM 30/21, 38–39/26–27.
philosophy’, European Journal of Philosophy 127
KPM 84/59; cf. 119/84.
16,2 (2008): 211–229. 128
KPM 135/95.
108
WWR I: 560–1. 129
Cf. KPM 134/95.
109
WWR I: 562, and Manuscript Remains in 130
KPM 135/95.
Four Volumes, ed. A. Hübscher, trans. E. F. J. 131
KPM 84/59.
Payne (Oxford, 1988), vol. II: 320. 132
KPM 142/99–100, 151/106.
110
For the full argument see my ‘Schopenhauer’s 133
KPM 137–138/96; cf. A15=B29.
transformation of the Kantian sublime’, 134
KPM 137/96–97.
Kantian Review 17,3 (2012): 479–511. 135
cf. KPM 197/138.
111
E.g. H. Bergson, G. Sorel, E. Durkheim, 136
KPM 164–169/115–118.
W. Dilthey, M. Weber, G. Simmel, R. Michels, 137
KPM 89/63.
G. Mosca and V. Pareto. 138
See A144=B183; cf. KPM 107–108/76.
112
In his book Kant und die Epigonen (Stuttgart, 139
Cf. KPM 197/138.
1865), in which he compared the German 140
KPM 103/73, 108/76.
idealists, Herbart, Fries and Schopenhauer 141
Cf. KPM 224–226/157–158.
with the Critical philosophy of whose 142
KPM 220/154.

345
Reception and Influence

143
KPM 200/140.
144
KPM 200/140; cf. B156.
145
KPM 189–191/132–134.
146
KPM 196/137.
147
KPM 202/141.
148
P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense. An Essay
on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London,
1966).
149
P. F. Strawson, Individuals. An Essay in
Descriptive Metaphysics (London, 1959).
150
See J. Campbell, Reference and
Consciousness (Oxford, 2002), Q. Cassam,
Self and World (Oxford, 1997), Q. Cassam,
The Possibility of Knowledge (Oxford, 2007),
and G. Evans, The Varieties of Reference
(Oxford, 1982).
151
W. Sellars, Science and Metaphysics:
Variations on Kantian Themes (Atascadero,
1992 [1968]).
152
J. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge,
MA, 1994, 21996); see also McDowell,
Having the World in View: Essays on Kant,
Hegel, and Sellars (Cambridge, MA, 2009)
153
R. Hanna, ‘Kant and non-conceptual content’,
European Journal of Philosophy 13 (2005):
247–290; R. Hanna, ‘Kantian non-concep-
tualism’, Philosophical Studies 137 (2008):
41–64; L. Allais, ‘Kant, non-conceptual con-
tent and the representation of space,’ Journal
of the History of Philosophy 47,3 (2009):
383–413.
154
J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge,
MA, 1971).
155
See further the essays ‘Analytic Approaches
to Kant’s Ethics’ and ‘Kantian Normativity in
Rawls, Korsgaard and continental practical
philosophy’, this volume.
156
M. Singer, Generalization in Ethics (New
York, 1961).
157
See e.g. O. O’Neill, Acting on Principle (New
York, 1975).
158
H. Paton, The Categorical Imperative
(Chicago, 1948).
159
B. Aune, Kant’s Theory of Morals (Princeton,
1979).
160
R. Galvin, ‘Ethical formalism: the contradic-
tion in conception test’, History of Philosophy
Quarterly 8,4 (1991): 387–408.
161
C. Korsgaard, ‘Kant’s formula of universal
law’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 66
(1985): 24–47.
162
See however S. Engstrom, The Form
of Practical Knowledge: A Study of the
Categorical Imperative (Cambridge, MA,
2009) for one of the most recent attempts to
suggest otherwise.
163
See A. Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought
(Cambridge, 1999) and A. Wood, Kantian
Ethics (Cambridge, 2007).
164
R. Dean, The Value of Humanity in Kant’s
Moral Theory (Oxford, 2006).
165
H. Paton, The Categorical Imperative (Chicago,
1948); P. Guyer, ‘Ends of reason and ends of
nature: the place of teleology in Kant’s ethics’,
Journal of Value Inquiry 36 (2002): 161–186.
166
A. Reath, ‘Value and law in Kant’s moral
theory’, Ethics 114 (2003): 127–155.
167
T. C. Williams, The Concept of the
Categorical Imperative: A Study of the Place
of the Categorical Imperative in Kant’s
Ethical Theory (Oxford, 1968); P. Stratton-
Lake, Kant, Duty and Moral Worth (London/
New York, 2000).
168
W. D. Ross, Kant’s Ethical Theory (Oxford,
1954).
169
R. Audi, The Good in the Right: A Theory
of Intuition and Intrinsic Value (Princeton,
2004).
170
See C. Onof, ‘Moral worth and inclinations in
Kantian ethics’, Kant Studies Online, posted 7
April 2011.
171
C. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends
(Cambridge, 1996).
172
S. Holtmann, ‘Autonomy and the kingdom of
ends’, in T. Hill (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to
Kant’s Ethics (Oxford/New York, 2009),
pp. 102–118, which should be compared with
P. Guyer, ‘Kant on the theory and practice
of autonomy’, in P. Guyer, Kant’s System
of Nature and Freedom: Selected Essays
(Cambridge, 2005), pp. 115–145.
173
See the essays in P. Guyer (ed.), Kant’s
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals:
Critical Essays (Lanham, 1998) for various
accounts of the formulas.
174
See S. Freeman, ‘Utilitarianism, deontology,
and the priority of the right’, Philosophy and
Public Affairs 23,4 (1994): 313–349, which
however says little about application.
175
This also connects to Silber’s conception of the
summum bonum as composed for Kant of heter-
ogeneous goods. See J. Silber, ‘Kant’s conception

346

of the highest good as immanent and transcend-
ent’, Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 469–492.
176
B. Herman, ‘Leaving deontology behind’, in
B. Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment
(Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 208–240.
177
P. Guyer, ‘Morality of law and morality of free-
dom’, in P. Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law and
Happiness (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 129–171.
178
D. Cummiskey, Kantian Consequentialism
(Oxford, 1996).
179
See J. Timmermann, Kant’s Groundwork of
the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary
(Cambridge, 2007).
180
See very recently D. Parfit, On What Matters,
2 vols. (Oxford, 2011).
181
J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford,
1971).
182
A. Reath, ‘Value and law in Kant’s moral
theory’, Ethics 114 (2003): 127–155.
183
This is also present in R. Dean, The Value of
Humanity in Kant’s Moral Theory (Oxford,
2006)
184
B. Williams, ‘Internal and external reasons’, in
B. Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge, 1982),
pp. 101–113.
185
C. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity
(Cambridge, 1996).
186
R. Jay Wallace, Normativity and the Will:
Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and
Practical Reason (Oxford, 2006).
187
W. Waxman, Kant’s Model of the Mind:
A New Interpretation of Transcendental
Idealism (Oxford, 1991).
188
R. McCarty, Kant’s Theory of Action (Oxford,
2009).
189
G. Banham, Kant’s Practical Philosophy:
From Critique to Doctrine (Basingstoke/New
York, 2003).
190
H. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom
(Cambridge, 1990) concentrates on free-
dom in general, including in the theoretical
philosophy.
191
M. Gregor, Laws of Freedom: A Study of
Kant’s Method of Applying the Categorical
Imperative in the Metaphysik der Sitten
(Cambridge, 1963).
192
K. Flikschuh, Kant and Modern Political
Philosophy (Cambridge, 2000).
193
A. Ripstein, Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal
and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA,
2009).
347
Reception and Influence
194
B. S. Byrd, J. Hruschka, Kant’s Doctrine of
Right: A Commentary (Cambridge, 2010).
195
L. Denis, Moral Self-Regard: Duties to
Oneself in Kant’s Moral Theory (New York,
2001).
196
J. Grenberg, Kant and the Ethics of Humility:
A Story of Dependence, Corruption and
Virtue (Cambridge, 2005).
197
A. M. Baxley, Kant’s Theory of Virtue: The
Value of Autocracy (Cambridge, 2011).
198
C. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity,
ed. O. O’Neill (Cambridge, 1996).
199
C. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity,
p. 89.
200
C. Onof, ‘Reconstructing the grounding of
Kant’s ethics: a critical assessment’, Kant-
Studien 100,4 (2009): 496–517.
201
C. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends
(Cambridge, 1996), p. 169.
202
See J. Rawls, Lectures on the History
of Moral Philosophy, ed. B. Herman
(Cambridge, MA, 2000), pp. 172–173 [here-
after referred to as Lectures].
203
See J. Rawls, Lectures, p. 149.
204
J. Rawls, Lectures, pp. 174–175.
205
See K. Budde, ‘Rawls on Kant: Is Rawls a
Kantian or Kant a Rawlsian?’, European
Journal of Political Theory 6 (2007): 348.
206
See K. Budde, ‘Rawls on Kant’, p. 352.
207
See J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford,
1971).
208
Scanlon is a key figure of contractualism; see
T. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other
(Cambridge, MA, 1988). Scanlon’s contractu-
alism is less Kantian than Rawls’s, and so is
not examined here: Scanlon seeks principles
that no-one can reasonably reject, rather than
principles that all would agree to, as Rawls
does. He also provides a substantive account
of the ground of morality, rather than attempt
to ground practical constraints outside
morality.
209
R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New
York, 1974). For an important response to
Nozick, see J. Wolff, Robert Nozick. Property,
Justice and the Minimal State (Cambridge,
1991).
210
See K.-O. Apel, ‘Diskursethik als
Verantwortungsethik – eine postmetaphy-
sische Transformation der Ethik Kants’,
in J. Schönrich, Y. Kato (eds), Kant in der
Reception and Influence
Diskussion der Moderne (Frankfurt a/M,
1996), pp. 326–359 [hereafter referred
to as ‘Diskursethik’]; K.-O. Apel, Karl-
Otto Apel: Selected Essays. Volume II:
Ethics and the Theory of Rationality, ed.
E. Mendieta (New Jersey, 1996) [hereaf-
ter referred to as Selected Essays]; and
J. Habermas, ‘Diskursethik – Notizen
zu einem Begründungsprogramm’, in
Moralbewußtsein und kommunikatives
Handeln (Frankfurt a/M, 1983), pp.
53–126.
211
See K.-O. Apel, ‘Diskursethik’, p. 332.
212
See K.-O. Apel, Selected Essays, pp. 196–197.
213
See K.-O. Apel, Selected Essays, pp.
198–199.
214
See K.-O. Apel, Selected Essays, p. 195.
215
See K.-O. Apel, Selected Essays, p. 206.
216
See O. Höffe, ‘Kantian skepticism toward
transcendental ethics of communica-
tion’, in S. Benhabib, F. Dallmayr (eds),
348
The Communicative Ethics Controversy
(Cambridge, MA, 1990), pp. 193–219.
217
See J. Habermas, ‘Discourse ethics: notes
on a program of philosophical justifica-
tion’, S. Benhabib, F. Dallmayr (eds),
The Communicative Ethics Controversy
(Cambridge, MA, 1990), pp. 60–110.
218
See T. Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism
(Princeton, 1970).
219
See G. A. Cohen, ‘Reason, humanity, and
the moral law’, in C. Korsgaard, The
Sources of Normativity, ed. O. O’Neill
(Cambridge,1996), 186.
220
G. A. Cohen, ‘Reason, humanity, and the
moral law’, pp. 170–174.
221
See C. Korsgaard, The Sources of
Normativity, p. 235.
222
See C. Korsgaard, The Sources of
Normativity, pp. 228–229.
223
See C. Korsgaard, The Sources of
Normativity, p. 188.
 PART V:
BIBLIOGRAPHY
 6
KANT BIBLIOGRAPHY
The literature on Kant is very large and con-
stantly growing so it is necessarily the case
that this bibliography is selective but the
selection is aimed at providing for the reader
reference to the major recent works on each
aspect of Kant’s philosophy, at least with
regard to English-language contributions.
Only very selective attention has been paid
to work in other languages with the result
that the overwhelming focus is on works in
English. However, this bibliography is rare in
presenting works on each of the major ele-
ments of the Critical division of Kant’s works
in addition to incorporating wide material
on the background, context and influence of
the Critical philosophy. – GB/DS
1. Kant’s Works in German
The standard critical edition of Kant’s works,
which provides the pagination for all vol-
umes cited in this Companion other than the
Critique of Pure Reason is Kant’s gesammelte
Schriften, edited by the Königlich Preußische
Akademie der Wissenschaften, subsequently
Deutsche and then Berlin-Brandenburg
Akademie der Wissenschaften and which is
generally simply referred to as the Akademie
351
edition (see further the List of Abbreviations
in this volume).
2. English Translations
The Cambridge Edition of Kant’s work, which
has been appearing since 1992, edited by Paul
Guyer and Allen Wood, has gained authority
as the source for many of Kant’s works and
includes translations of lectures and notes
that were, until very recently, not available
at all in English. The edition of the Critique
of Pure Reason, published in 1998, has not,
however, decisively replaced the long-classic
translation by Norman Kemp Smith (1929)
(published by Palgrave Macmillan). The
2007 edition of Kemp Smith also includes an
extensive bibliography of English-language
work on the Critique but does not entirely
overlap with this one as it is more focused
than this. Alongside these two translations
of the Critique an important third one, by
Werner Pluhar, has also appeared (1996).
Hackett, the publishers of Pluhar’s edition
of the Critique of Pure Reason, have further
published translations by him of the Critique
of Judgment and the Critique of Practical
Reason. Hackett and Cambridge University
Kant Bibliography
Press thus offer competing translations of the
central Critical works. For a list of transla-
tions of Kant’s works into English, see P.
Guyer (ed.)(2010), pp. 668–673.
3. Biographies of Kant
Cassirer, E., Kant’s Life and Thought (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1981
[1918]).
Gulyga, A., Immanuel Kant: His Life and
Thought (Boston: Birkhauser, 1987).
Kuehn, M., Kant: A Biography (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Stuckenberg, J. W. H., The Life of Immanuel
Kant (Lanham, MD/London: University
Press of America, 1986 [1882]).
4. Introductions to Kant
Altman, M., A Companion to Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason (Boulder:
Westview, 2008).
Broad, C. D., Kant: An Introduction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1978).
Buroker, J. V., Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason: An Introduction (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Callanan, J., Kant’s Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals: An Edinburgh
Philosophical Guide (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
Dicker, G., Kant’s Theory of Knowledge: An
Analytical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005).
Dudley, W. & K. Engelhard (eds), Immanuel
Kant: Key Concepts (Durham: Acumen,
2011).
352
Ewing, A. C., A Short Commentary
on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1938).
Gardner, S., Kant and the Critique of Pure
Reason (London/New York: Routledge,
1999).
Guyer, P., Kant (London/New York:
Routledge, 2006).
Hall, B., The Arguments of Kant’s ‘Critique
of Pure Reason’ (Lanham, MD:
Lexington, 2011).
Hartnack, J., Kant’s Theory of Knowledge
(London/Toronto: Macmillan, 1968).
Hughes, F., Kant’s ‘Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment’: A Reader’s Guide (London/
New York: Continuum, 2009).
Körner, S., Kant (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1955).
Luchte, J., Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’:
A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum,
2007).
O’Shea, J., Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:
An Introduction and Interpretation
(Durham: Acumen, 2012).
Robinson, D.,  How is Nature
Possible? Kants Project in the First
Critique  (London/New York:
Continuum, 2011).
Rosenberg, J., Accessing Kant: A Relaxed
Introduction to the ‘Critique of Pure
Reason’ (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005).
Savile, A., Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:
An Orientation to the Central Themes
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
Scruton, R., Kant: A Very Short
Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001).
Segdwick, S., Kant’s Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals: An Introduction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008).

Uleman, J. K., An Introduction to Kant’s
Moral Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Walker, R. C. S., Kant (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1978).
Ward, A., Kant: The Three Critiques
(Cambridge: Polity, 2006).
–––––, Starting with Kant (London/New
York: Continuum, 2012).
Wenzel, C. H., An Introduction to Kant’s
Aesthetics (Oxford/New York: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2005).
Wilkerson, T. E., Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1976).
Wood, A. W., Kant (Oxford/New York:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2005).
5. MULTI-AUTHOR Edited
Collections on Kant
Anderson-Gold, S. & P. Muchnik (eds),
Kant’s Anatomy of Evil (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Baiasu, S., S. Pihlstrom & H. Williams (eds),
Politics and Metaphysics in Kant (Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 2011).
Beck, L. W. (ed.), Kant Studies Today
(Chicago/La Salle, IL: Open Court,
1967).
––––– (ed.), Kant’s Theory of Knowledge
(Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974).
Beiner, R. & J. Booth (eds), Kant & Political
Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993).
Bird, G. (ed.), A Companion to Kant
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
Bohman, J. & M. Lutz-Bachmann (eds),
Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s
Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1997).
353
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Bruxvoort Lipscomb, B. & J. Krueger (eds),
Kant’s Moral Metaphysics (Berlin/New
York: Gruyter, 2010).
Butts, R. E. (ed.), Kant’s Philosophy of
Physical Science (Dordrecht: D. Reidel,
1986).
Chadwick, R. & C. Cazeaux (eds),
Immanuel Kant: Critical Assessments,
4 vols. (London/New York: Routledge,
1992).
Cicovacki, P. (ed.), Kant’s Legacy (Rochester:
University of Rochester Press, 2001).
Clewis, R. (ed.), Reading Kant’s Lectures
(Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2015).
Cohen, A. (ed.), Kant’s Lectures on
Anthropology: A Critical Guide
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014).
––––– (ed.), Kant on Emotion and Value
(London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014).
Cohen, T. & Guyer, P. (eds), Essays in
Kant’s Aesthetics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982).
Dancy, R. M. (ed.), Kant and Critique
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993).
Denis, L. (ed.), Kant’s ‘Metaphysics of
Morals’: A Critical Guide (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Elden, S. & E. Mendieta (eds), Reading
Kant’s Geography (Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 2011).
Emundts, D. (ed.) Self, World, and Art.
Metaphysical Topics in Kant and Hegel
(Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2013).
Engstrom, S. & J. Whiting (eds), Aristotle,
Kant and the Stoics: Rethinking
Happiness and Duty (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Firestone, C. & S. Palmquist (eds), Kant
and the New Philosophy of Religion
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2006).
Kant Bibliography
Firestone, C. & N. Jacobs (eds), In Defense
of Kant’s Religion (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 2008).
Fischer, N. (ed.), Kants Grundlegung einer
kritischen Metaphysik (Hamburg: Meiner,
2010).
Förster, E. (ed.), Kant’s Transcendental
Deductions (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1989).
Giordanetti, P., R. Pozzo & M. Sgarbi
(eds), Kant’s Philosophy of the
Unconscious (Berlin/New York: de
Gruyter, 2012).
Goy, I. & E. Watkins (eds), Kant’s Theory
of Biology (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter,
2014).
Gram, M. S. (ed.), Kant: Disputed
Questions (Chicago: Quadrangle
Books, 1967; second expanded edition,
Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing,
1984).
––––– (ed.), Interpreting Kant (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1982).
Guyer, P. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion
to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992).
––––– (ed.), Kant’s Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals: Critical Essays
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
1998).
––––– (ed.), Kant’s Critique of the Power of
Judgment: Critical Essays (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
––––– (ed.), The Cambridge Companion
to Kant and Modern Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006).
––––– (ed.), The Cambridge Companion
to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010).
354
Harper, W. A. & R. Meerbote (eds), Kant
on Causality, Freedom, and Objectivity
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984).
Heidemann, D. (ed.), Kant and Non-
Conceptual Content (Abingdon/New
York: Routledge, 2012).
Hill, T. E. (ed.), The Blackwell Guide
to Kant’s Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell,
2009).
Höffe, O. (ed.), Grundlegung der
Metaphysik der Sitten: Ein kooperativer
Kommentar (Frankfurt a/M: Vittorio
Klostermann, 1989).
Höwing, T. (ed.), The Highest Good in
Kant’s Philosophy (Berlin/New York: de
Gruyter, 2015).
Horn, C. & D. Schönecker (eds),
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of
Morals (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter,
2006).
Jacobs, B. & P. Kain (eds), Essays on Kant’s
Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
Jost, L. & J. Wuerth (eds), Perfecting Virtue:
New Essays on Kantian Ethics and Virtue
Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011).
Kennington, R. (ed.), The Philosophy
of Immanuel Kant (Washington, DC:
Catholic University Press, 1985).
Kitcher, P. (ed.), Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littefield, 1998).
Kneller, J. & S. Axinn (eds), Autonomy and
Community: Readings in Contemporary
Kantian Social Philosophy (Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 1998).
Kukla, R. (ed.), Aesthetics and Cognition in
Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Lyre, H. & O. Schliemann (eds), Kants
‘Prolegomena’: Ein kooperativer
Kommentar (Frankfurt a/M:
Klostermann, 2012).
Massimi, M. (ed.), Kant and Philosophy of
Science Today (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008).
Michalson, G. (ed.), Kant’s ‘Religion within
the Boundaries of Mere Reason’: A
Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014).
Mohanty, J. N. & R. W. Shahan (eds),
Essays on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
(Norman: University of Oaklahoma
Press, 1982).
Ouden, B. den & M. Moen (eds), New
Essays on Kant (New York: Peter Lang,
1987).
Palmquist, S. (ed.), Cultivating Personhood:
Kant and Asian Philosophy (Berlin/New
York: de Gruyter 2010).
Parret, H. (ed.), Kants Ästhetik/Kant’s
Aesthetics/L’esthétique de Kant (Berlin/
New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998).
Parrini, P. (ed.), Kant and Contemporary
Epistemology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994).
Payne, C. & L. Thorpe (eds), Kant and the
Concept of Community (Rochester, NY:
University of Rochester Press, 2011).
Penelhum, T. & J. MacIntosh (eds), The
First Critique: Reflections on Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason (Belmont:
Wadsworth, 1969).
Posy, C. (ed.), Kant’s Philosophy of
Mathematics (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992).
Reath, A. & J. Timmermann (eds), Kant’s
Critique of Practical Reason: A Critical
Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010).
Rockmore, T. (ed.), New Essays on the
Precritical Kant (Amherst, NY: Humanity,
2001).
355
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Rorty, A. & J. Schmidt (eds), Kant’s ‘Idea for
a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan
Aim’: A Critical Guide (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Roth, K. & C. Surprenant (eds), Kant
and Education: Interpretations and
Commentary (London/New York:
Routledge, 2011).
Rothfield, P. (ed.), Kant after Derrida
(Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003).
Schaper, E. & W. Vossenkuhl (eds),
Reading Kant: New Perspectives on
Transcendental Arguments and Critical
Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
Schott, R. M. (ed.), Feminist Interpretations
of Immanuel Kant (University Park: Penn
State University Press, 1997).
Schulting, D. & J. Verburgt (eds), Kant’s
Idealism: New Interpretations of a
Controversial Doctrine (Dordrecht:
Springer Science, 2011).
Sensen, O. (ed.), Kant on Moral Autonomy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012).
Shell, S. Meld & R. Velkley (eds), Kant’s
Observations and Remarks: A Critical
Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012).
Thompson, M. (ed.), Imagination in Kant’s
Critical Philosophy (Berlin/New York: de
Gruyter, 2013).
Timmermann, J. (ed.), Kant’s Groundwork
of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical
Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009).
Timmons, M. (ed.), Kant’s Metaphysics of
Morals: Interpretative Essays (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2002).
Timmons, M. & S. Baiasu (eds), Kant on
Practical Justification: Interpretative
Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013).
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Trampota, A., O. Sensen & J. Timmermann
(eds), Kant’s ‘Tugendlehre’: A
Comprehensive Commentary (Berlin/New
York: de Gruyter, 2013).
Walker, R. C. S. (ed.), Kant on Pure Reason
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
Watkins, E. (ed.), Kant and the Sciences
(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001).
Williams, H. (ed.), Essays on Kant’s Political
Philosophy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992).
Wolff, R. P. (ed.), Kant: A Collection of
Critical Essays (Garden City: Doubleday
Anchor, 1967).
Wood, A. W. (ed.), Self and Nature in
Kant’s Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1984).
Yovel, Y. (ed.), Kant’s Practical Philosophy
Reconsidered (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989).
6. Context and Reception of
Kant’s Work
Allison, H. E., Lessing and the
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–––––, The Kant-Eberhard Controversy
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
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–––––, ‘Kant’s critique of Spinoza’, in R.
Kennington (ed.), The Philosophy of
Spinoza (Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 1980),
pp. 199–227.
Altmann, A., Moses Mendelssohn: A
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Al-Azm, S., The Origins of Kant’s
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Ameriks, K., Kant and the Fate
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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000).
–––––, Kant and the Historical Turn:
Philosophy as Critical Interpretation
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).
–––––, Kant’s Elliptical Path (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2012).
Anderson, R. L., ‘The Wolffian paradigm
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Bailey, T., ‘Nietzsche the Kantian?’, in
K. Gemes & J. Richardson (eds),
The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche
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pp. 134–159.
Banham, G. ‘The continental tradition:
Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche’, in J. Mullarkey
& B. Lord (eds), The Continuum
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Baumgarten, H.-U., Kant und Tetens
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Beck, L. W., Early German Philosophy:
Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge,
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Beiser, F., The Fate of Reason: German
Philosophy From Kant to Fichte
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Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801
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Berg, H. v.d., ‘Wolff and Kant on scientific
demonstration and mechanical
explanation’, Archiv für Geschichte der
Philosophie 95,2 (2013): 178–205.

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Boer, K. de, ‘Transformations of
transcendental philosophy: Wolff,
Kant, and Hegel’, Bulletin of the Hegel
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Bristow, W., Hegel and the Transformation
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Schwärmerei’, in Antike Themen und ihre
moderne Verwandlung (Frankfurt a/M,
Suhrkamp, 1992), pp. 80–93.
Buroker, J. V., Space and Incongruence: The
Origin of Kant’s Idealism (Dordrecht: D.
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Butts, R. E., ‘The grammar of reason:
Hamann’s challenge to Kant’, Synthese 75
(1988): 251–283.
Carrasco, M. A., ‘Adam Smith’s
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Review of Metaphysics 58 (2004):
81–116.
Cavallar, G., ‘Kant’s judgment on Frederick’s
enlightened absolutism’, History of
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Caygill, H., Art of Judgement (Oxford:
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Chignell, A. (ed.), ‘On going back to Kant’,
special issue on neo-Kantianism, The
Philosophical Forum 39, 2 (2008):
109–298.
Dahlstrom, D., ‘The Critique of Pure Reason
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interpretation of transcendental
imagination’, in P. Guyer (ed.) (2010),
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Darwall, S., ‘Sympathetic liberalism:
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Davies, M. L., Marcus Herz and the End of
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Di Giovanni, G., ‘Kant’s metaphysics
of nature and Schelling’s Ideas for
a Philosophy of Nature’, Journal of
the History of Philosophy 17 (1979):
197–215.
–––––, ‘The first twenty years of critique:
the Spinoza connection’, in P. Guyer (ed.)
(1992), pp. 417–448.
–––––, ‘Hume, Jacobi, and common sense:
an episode in the reception of Hume
at the time of Kant’, Kant-Studien 89
(1998): 44–58.
–––––, ‘Faith without religion, and
religion without faith: Kant and Hegel
on religion’, Journal of the History of
Philosophy 41,3 (2003): 365–383.
–––––, Freedom and Religion in Kant
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Vocation of Humankind, 1774–1800
(Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Dixon, R. A., ‘Johann Nicolas Tetens:
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psychology?’, International Journal of
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priori necessity of geometry’, Studies in
the History and Philosophy of Science
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identity: Kant’s theory of apperception
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–––––, ‘The reception of Kant’s doctrine
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Emergence of German Idealism
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Smit, H., ‘The role of reflection in Kant’s
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–––––, ‘Kant on marks and the immediacy
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386
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Stuart, J. D., ‘Kant’s two refutations of
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The Philosophical Review 113,2 (2004):
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Kant-Studien 92 (2001): 440–463.
–––––, ‘Fate and the fortune of the
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Thomas, A., ‘Kant, McDowell, and the
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–––––, ‘The generality of Kant’s
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Kant’s second analogy’, Kant-Studien 64
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British Journal for the History of
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–––––, Kant’s Criticism of Metaphysics
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–––––, Reality and Impenetrability in
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Kant-Studien 70 (1979): 409–424.
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–––––, ‘Did Kant have a theory of self–
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–––––, ‘Kant’s third analogy of
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–––––, Kant’s Silent Decade (Tallahasee, FL:
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–––––, Kant: The Architectonic and
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Westphal, K. R., ‘Kant’s dynamic
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8. Kant’s Practical Philosophy
(INCLUDING RELIGION)
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Rosen, A. D., Kant’s Theory of Justice (Ithaca,
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Rosenkoetter, T., ‘Kant on construction,
apriority, and the moral relevance of
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Rossvaer, V., Kant’s Moral Philosophy
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Rumsey, J. P., ‘The development of character
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–––––, ‘Agency, human nature, and character
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Sadler, B., ‘Marriage: A matter of right or
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Samet, I., ‘The form of evil’, Kantian Review
14,2 (2010): 93–117.
406
Sargentis, K., ‘Moral motivation in Kant’,
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Schaller, W. E., ‘Kant on virtue and moral
worth’, Southern Journal of Philosophy
25 (1987): 559–573.
–––––, ‘Kant’s architectonic of duties’,
Philosophy and Phenomenological
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–––––, ‘Should Kantians care about moral
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–––––, ‘From the Groundwork to the
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Philosophy Quarterly 12 (1995):
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–––––, ‘Kant on right and moral rights’,
Southern Journal of Philosophy 38
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Schapiro, T., ‘Kantian rigorism and
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–––––, ‘Foregrounding desire: A defense of
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–––––, ‘Kant’s retributivism again’, Archiv
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Sherline, E., ‘Heteronomy and spurious
principles of morality in Kant’s
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Some refinements, a new proposal, and a
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–––––, ‘Kant’s moral intuitionism: the fact of
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–––––, ‘On lying and the role of content in
Kant’s ethics’, Kant-Studien 82 (1991):
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–––––, ‘Kant’s conception of inner value’,
European Journal of Philosophy 19,2
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–––––, Kant on Human Dignity (Berlin/New
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–––––, ‘The role of feelings in Kant’s moral
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Shell, S. M., The Rights of Reason (Toronto:
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–––––, The Embodiment of Reason: Kant
on Spirit, Generation, and Community
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407
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–––––, ‘Kant on punishment’, Kantian
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–––––, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
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–––––, ‘”Nachschrift eines Freundes”’: Kant
on language, friendship and the concept
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88–117.
Sherman, N., ‘Reasons and feelings in
Kantian morality’, Philosophy and
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–––––, Making A Necessity of Virtue:
Aristotle and Kant on Virtue
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–––––, ‘Concrete Kantian respect’, Social
Philosophy and Policy 15 (1998):
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Silber J. R., ‘The Copernican revolution
in ethics: the good reexamined’, Kant-
Studien 51 (1959): 85–101.
–––––, ‘Kant’s conception of the highest
good as immanent and transcendent’,
The Philosophical Review 68 (1959):
469–492.
–––––, ‘The metaphysical importance of
the highest good as the canon of pure
reason in Kant’s moral philosophy’, Texas
Studies in Language and Literature 1
(1959): 233–244.
–––––, ‘The importance of the highest good
in Kant’s ethics’, Ethics 73 (1962–3):
179–197.
–––––, ‘Procedural formalism in Kant’s
ethics’, Review of Metaphysics 28 (1974):
197–236.
–––––, ‘The moral good and the natural
good in Kant’s ethics’, Review of
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–––––, Kant’s Ethics: The Good, Freedom
and the Will (Berlin/New York: de
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Simmons, K., ‘Kant on moral worth’,
History of Philosophy Quarterly 6
(1989): 85–100.
Singer, M. G., ‘The categorical imperative’,
The Philosophical Review 63 (1954):
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–––––, Generalization in Ethics (New York:
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–––––, ‘Reconstructing the Groundwork’,
Ethics 93 (1983): 566–578.
Siyar, J., ‘The conditionality of hypothetical
imperatives’, Kantian Review 18,3
(2013): 439–460.
Skorpen, E., ‘Making sense of Kant’s third
example’, Kant-Studien 72 (1981):
415–429.
Smit, H. & M. Timmons, ‘The moral
significance of gratitude in Kant’s ethics’,
Southern Journal of Philosophy 49,4
(2011): 295–320.
Sneddon, A., ‘A new Kantian response to
maxim-fiddling’, Kantian Review 16,1
(2011): 67–88.
Sorensen, K., ‘Kant’s taxonomy of the
emotions’, Kantian Review 6 (2002):
109–128.
Stark, C. A., ‘The rationality of valuing
oneself’, Journal of the History of
Philosophy 35 (1997): 65–82.
Stern, D. S., ‘Autonomy and political
obligation in Kant’, Southern Journal of
Philosophy 29 (1991): 127–148.
Stern, P., ‘The problem of history and
temporality in Kantian ethics’, Review of
Metaphysics 39 (1986): 504–545.
Stern, R. ‘Moral scepticism and agency:
Kant and Korsgaard’, Ratio 23 (2010):
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Stohr, K., ‘Kantian beneficence and the
problem of obligatory aid’, Journal of
Moral Philosophy 8 (2011): 45–67.
Stratton–Lake, P., ‘Formulating categorical
imperatives’, Kant-Studien 84 (1993):
317–340.
–––––, Kant, Duty and Moral Worth
(London: Routledge, 2000).
Sullivan, R. J., Immanuel Kant’s Moral
Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge
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–––––, ‘The positive role of prudence in the
virtuous life’, Jahrbuch für Recht und
Ethik 5 (1997): 461–470.
–––––, ‘How Bernard Williams constructed
his critique of Kant’s moral theory’,
Kantian Review 3 (1999): 106–113.
Surprenant, C. W., ‘Cultivating virtue: moral
progress and the Kantian state’, Kantian
Review 12 (2007): 90–112.
–––––, ‘Kant’s postulate of the immortality
of the soul’, International Philosophical
Quarterly 48 (2008): 85–98.
–––––, ‘Liberty, autonomy, and Kant’s civil
society’, History of Philosophy Quarterly
27 (2010): 79–94.
–––––, Kant and the Cultivation of Virtue
(Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2014).
Sussman, D., The Idea of Humanity.
Anthropology and Anthroponomy
in Kant’s Ethics (London/New York:
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–––––, ‘Kantian forgiveness’, Kant-Studien
96,1 (2005): 85–107.
–––––, ‘Shame and punishment in Kant’s
Doctrine of Right’, Philosophical Quarterly
58,231 (2008): 299–317.
Sutch, P., ‘Kantians and cosmopolitans’,
Kantian Review 4 (2000): 98–120.

Svoboda, T., ‘Duties regarding nature: A
Kantian approach to environmental
ethics’, Kant Yearbook 4 (2012): 143–164.
Sweet, K., Kant on Practical Life: From
Duty to History (Cambridge: Cambridge
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Swoyer, C., ‘Kantian derivations’, Canadian
Journal of Philosophy 13 (1983):
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Taylor, C., ‘Kant’s theory of freedom’,
in J. N. Gray & Z. Pelczynski (eds),
Conceptions of Liberty in Political
Philosophy (New York: St Martin’s Press,
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Tenenbaum, S., ‘The idea of freedom and
moral cognition in Groundwork III’,
Philosophy and Phenomenological
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Téson, F., ‘The Kantian theory of
international law’, Columbia Law Review
92 (1992): 53–102.
Thomason, K., ‘Shame and contempt in
Kant’s moral theory’, Kantian Review
18,2 (2013): 221–240.
Timmermann, J., ‘When the tail wags the
dog: Animal welfare and indirect duty
in Kantian ethics’, Kantian Review 10,1
(2005): 128–149.
–––––, ‘Value without regress: Kant’s “formula
of humanity” revisited’, European Journal
of Philosophy 14 (2006): 69–93.
–––––, ‘Kant on conscience, “indirect” duty and
moral error’, International Philosophical
Quarterly 46 (2006): 293–308.
–––––, Kant’s Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
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–––––, ‘Acting from duty: inclination, reason
and moral worth’, in J. Timmermann
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–––––, ‘Kantian dilemmas? Moral conflict
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Timmons, M., ‘Contradictions and the
categorical imperative’, Archiv für
Geschichte der Philosophie 66 (1984):
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–––––, ‘Kant and the possibility of moral
motivation’, Southern Journal of
Philosophy 23 (1985): 377–398.
–––––, ‘Necessitation and justification
in Kant’s ethics’, Canadian Journal of
Philosophy 22 (1992): 223–261.
–––––, ‘Decision procedures, moral criteria,
and the problem of relevant descriptions
in Kant’s ethics’, Jahrbuch für Recht und
Ethik 5 (1997): 389–417.
Tunick, M., ‘Is Kant a retributivist?’, History
of Political Thought 17 (1996): 60–78.
Uleman, J., ‘On Kant, infanticide, and
finding oneself in a state of nature’,
Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung
54 (2000): 173–195.
Vandenauweele, D., ‘The Lutheran influence
on Kant’s depraved will’, International
Journal for Philosophy of Religion 73,2
(2013): 117–134.
Varden, H., ‘Kant and dependency relations:
Kant on the state’s right to redistribute
resources to protect the rights of
dependents’, Dialogue 45,2 (2006):
257–284.
–––––, ‘Kant’s non-voluntarist conception
of political obligations: why justice is
impossible in the state of nature’, Kantian
Review 13,2 (2008): 1–45.
–––––, ‘Kant and lying to the murderer at
the door . . . One more time: Kant’s legal
philosophy and lies to murderers and
nazis’, Journal of Social Philosophy 41,4
(2010): 403–421.
–––––, ‘Kant’s non-absolutist conception
of political legitimacy: how public right
“concludes” private right in the Doctrine
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of Right’, Kant-Studien 101,3 (2010):
331–351.
–––––, ‘A Kantian critique of the care
tradition: family law and systemic justice’,
Kantian Review 17,2 (2012): 327–356.
Velkley, R. L., Freedom and the End of
Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1989).
Verhaegh, M., ‘Property by agreement:
interpreting Kant’s account of right’,
British Journal for the History of
Philosophy 14,4 (2006): 687–717.
Vilhauer, B., ‘The scope of responsibility in
Kant’s theory of free will’, British Journal
for the History of Philosophy 18 (2010):
45–71.
Voeller, C., The Metaphysics of the Moral
Law: Kant’s Deduction of Freedom (New
York: Routledge, 2001).
Ward, A., ‘On Kant’s defence of moral
freedom’, History of Philosophy
Quarterly 8 (1991): 373–386.
Ware, O., ‘The duty of self-knowledge’,
Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 79,3 (2009): 671–698.
Watson, S. H., ‘Kant on autonomy, the
ends of humanity, and the possibility
of morality’, Kant-Studien 77 (1986):
165–182.
Weinrib, E. J., ‘Law as a Kantian idea of
reason’, Columbia Law Review 87,3
(1987): 472–508.
Weinstock, D. M., ‘Natural law and public
reason in Kant’s political philosophy’,
Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26
(1996): 389–411.
Westphal, K. R., ‘Kant on the state, law,
and obedience to authority in the alleged
“anti-revolutionary” writings’, Journal
of Philosophical Research 17 (1992):
383–426.
–––––, ‘Republicanism, despotism, and
obedience to the state’, Jahrbuch für
410
Recht und Ethik/Annual Review of Law
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–––––, ‘How “full” is Kant’s categorical
imperative?’, Jahrbuch für Recht und
Ethik/Annual Review of Law and Ethics
3 (1995): 465–509.
––––– ‘Do Kant’s principles justify property
or usufruct?’, Jahrbuch für Recht und
Ethik/Annual Review of Law and Ethics
5 (1997): 141–194.
White, M., ‘Adam Smith and Immanuel
Kant: On markets, duties, and moral
sentiments’, Forum for Social Economics
39 (2010): 53–60.
–––––, Kantian Ethics and Economics
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Wiggins, D., ‘Categorical requirements: Kant
and Hume on the idea of duty’, Monist
74 (1991): 83–106.
Wike, V. S., ‘Metaphysical foundations
of morality in Kant’, Journal of Value
Inquiry 17 (1983): 225–233.
–––––, ‘Does Kant’s ethics require that the
moral law be the sole determining ground
of the will?’, Journal of Value Inquiry 27
(1993): 85–92.
–––––, Kant on Happiness in Ethics (Albany,
NY: SUNY Press, 1994).
–––––, ‘Defending Kant against Noddings’
care ethics critique’, Kant Studies Online
(2011): 1–26.
Wike, V. & R. Showler, ‘Kant’s concept of
the highest good and the archetype-ectype
distinction’, Journal of Value Inquiry 44
(2010): 521–533.
Willaschek, M., ‘Why the Doctrine of Right
does not belong in the Metaphysics of
Morals’, Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik/
Annual Review of Law and Ethics 5
(1997): 205–227.
–––––, ‘Right and coercion. Can Kant’s
conception of right be derived from his
moral theory?’, International Journal

of Philosophical Studies 17,1 (2009):
49–70.
–––––, ‘The non-derivability of Kantian
right from the categorical imperative: A
response to Nance’, International Journal
of Philosophical Studies 20,4 (2012):
557–564.
Williams, G., ‘Between ethics and right:
Kantian politics and democratic
purposes’, European Journal of
Philosophy 20,3 (2012): 479–486.
Williams, H., Kant’s Political Philosophy
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
–––––, ‘Kant, Rawls, Habermas and the
metaphysics of justice’, Kantian Review 3
(1999): 1–17.
–––––, Kant’s Critique of Hobbes (Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 2003).
–––––, ‘Towards a Kantian theory of
international distributive justice’, Kantian
Review 15,2 (2010): 43–77.
–––––, Kant and the End of War: A Critique
of Just War Theory (Basingstoke/New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Williams, T. C., The Concept of the
Categorical Imperative (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1968).
Wilson, E. E., ‘Kant on autonomy and the
value of persons’, Kantian Review 18,2
(2013): 241–262.
Wilson, H., Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology:
Its Origin, Meaning and Critical
Significance (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
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Wolterstorff, N., ‘Is it possible and desirable
for theologians to recover from Kant?’,
in N. Wolterstorff, Inquiring about God.
Selected Essays, volume 1 (Cambridge:
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–––––, ‘Conundrums in Kant’s rational
religion’, in N. Wolterstorff, Inquiring
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Wood, A., Kant’s Moral Religion (Ithaca,
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–––––, ‘The emptiness of the moral will’,
The Monist 72 (1989): 454–483.
–––––, ‘Unsocial sociability: the
anthropological basis of Kantian
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–––––, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge:
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–––––, ‘The supreme principle of morality’,
in P. Guyer (ed.) (2006), pp. 342–380.
–––––, Kantian Ethics (Cambridge:
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Wolff, R. W., The Autonomy of Reason
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Wuerth, J., ‘Sense and sensibility in
Kant’s practical agent: Against the
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Sidgwick’, European Journal of
Philosophy 21,1 (2013): 1–36.
–––––, Kant on Mind, Action, and Ethics
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Wunsch, M., ‘The activity of sensibility in
Kant’s anthropology’, Kant Yearbook 3
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Wyrwich, T., ‘From gratification to justice.
The tension between anthropology
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Yost, B. S., ‘Kant’s justification of the death
penalty reconsidered’, Kantian Review
15,2 (2010): 1–27.
Yovel, Y., Kant and the Philosophy of
History (Princeton: Princeton University
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Ypi, L., ‘Natura Daedala Rerum? On the
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Kantian Review 14,2 (2010): 118–148.
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Zinkin, M., ‘Respect for the law and the use
of dynamical terms in Kant’s theory of
moral motivation’, Archiv für Geschichte
der Philosophie 88,1 (2006): 31–53.
Zinkstok, J., ‘Anthropology, empirical
psychology, and applied logic’, Kant
Yearbook 3 (2011): 107–130.
Zöller, G., ‘Kant’s political anthropology’,
Kant Yearbook 3 (2011): 131–161.
9. Kant’s Third Critique,
Aesthetics and Teleology
Allison, H. E., Kant’s Theory of Taste
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
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–––––, ‘Kant’s antinomy of teleological
judgment’, Southern Journal of Philosophy
30 (supplement) (1992): 25–42.
–––––, ‘Reflective judgment and the
application of logic to nature’, in
H. J. Glock (ed.) (2003), pp. 169–184.
Ameriks, K., ‘Kant and the objectivity of
taste’, British Journal of Aesthetics 23
(1983): 3–17.
Auxter, T., Kant’s Moral Teleology (Macon,
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Banham, G., Kant and the Ends of
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Baxley, A. M., ‘The practical significance of
taste in Kant’s Critique of Judgment’, The
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63,1 (2005): 33–45.
Beisbart, C., ‘Kant’s characterization of
natural ends’, Kant Yearbook 1 (2009):
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Breitenbach, A., ‘Two views on nature:
A solution to Kant’s antinomy of
mechanism and teleology’, British Journal
for the History of Philosophy 16 (2008):
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412
–––––, ‘Mechanical explanation of nature
and its limits in Kant’s Critique of
Judgment’, Studies in History and
Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical
Science 37 (2006): 694–711.
–––––, ‘Teleology in biology: a Kantian
perspective’, Kant Yearbook 1 (2009): 31–56.
–––––, ‘Aesthetics in science: A Kantian
proposal’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 113 (2013): 83–100.
–––––, ‘Biological purposiveness and
analogical reflection’, in I. Goy &
E. Watkins (eds), Kant’s Theory of
Biology (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter,
2014), pp. 131–148.
Brittan, G., Jr., ‘Systematicity and objectivity
in the third Critique’, Southern Journal of
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Bruno, P., Kant’s Concept of Genius. Its
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(London/New York: Continuum, 2010).
Burnham, D., An Introduction to Kant’s
Critique of Judgment (Edinburgh:
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Butts, R. E., ‘Teleology and scientific method
in Kant’s Critique of Judgment’, Noûs 24
(1990): 1–16.
–––––, ‘Kant’s theory of musical sound’,
Dialogue 32 (1993): 3–24.
Cannon, J., ‘The moral value of artistic
beauty in Kant’, Kantian Review 16,1
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–––––, ‘Reply to Paul Guyer’, Kantian
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Caranti, L., ‘Logical purposiveness and the
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(2005): 364–374.
Cassirer, H. W., A Commentary on Kant’s
Critique of Judgment (London: Methuen,
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Cheetham, M. A., Kant, Art, and Art
History (Cambridge: Cambridge
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Chignell, A., ‘Beauty as a symbol of
natural systematicity’, British Journal of
Aesthetics 46,4 (2006): 406–415.
–––––, ‘Kant on the normativity of taste:
The role of aesthetic ideas’, Australasian
Journal of Philosophy 85,3 (2007):
415–433.
Clewis, R., The Kantian Sublime and the
Revelation of Freedom (Cambridge:
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Cohen, A., ‘Kant on the possibility of
ugliness’,  British Journal of Aesthetics
53,2 (2013): 199–209.
Cohen, T., ‘Three problems in Kant’s
aesthetics’, British Journal of Aesthetics
42 (2002): 1–12.
Costello, D., ‘Kant and the problem of
strong non-perceptual art’, British Journal
of Aesthetics 53,3 (2013): 277–298.
Crawford, D. W., Kant’s Aesthetic Theory
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1974).
Crowther, P., ‘Fundamental ontology and
transcendent beauty: an approach to
Kant’s aesthetics’, Kant-Studien 76
(1985): 55–71.
–––––, ‘The Claims of Perfection’,
International Philosophical Quarterly 26
(1986): 61–74.
–––––, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality
to Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
–––––, The Kantian Aesthetic: From
Knowledge to the Avant-Garde (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2010).
DeBord, C., ‘Geist and communication in
Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas’, Kantian
Review 17,2 (2012): 177–190.
Deligiorgi, K. ‘The pleasures of contra-
purposiveness: Kant, the sublime, and
being human’, The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 72,1 (2014): 25–35.
Dobe, J. K. ‘Kant’s common sense and the
strategy for a deduction’, Journal of
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Dowling, C., ‘Zangwill, moderate
formalism and another look at Kant’s
aesthetic’, Kantian Review 15,2 (2010):
90–117.
Düsing, K., ‘Beauty as the transition from
nature to freedom in Kant’s Critique of
Judgment’, Noûs 24 (1990): 79–92.
Duve, T. D., Kant after Duchamp
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Fisher, J. & J. Maitland, ‘The subjectivist
turn in aesthetics’, Review of Metaphysics
27 (1974): 726–751.
Fricke, C., ‘Explaining the inexplicable: the
hypotheses of the faculty of reflective
judgment in Kant’s third Critique’, Noûs
24 (1990): 45–62.
Friedlander, E., Expressions of Judgment:
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Gammon, M., ‘”Parerga” and “Pulchritudo
adhaerens”. A reading of the third
moment of the “Analytic of the
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148–167.
Geiger, I., ‘Is teleological judgment (still)
necessary?’, British Journal for the
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533–566.
–––––, ‘Transcendental idealism in the third
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(eds) (2011), pp. 71–89.
Genova, A. C., ‘Kant’s complex problem
of reflective judgment’, Review of
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–––––, ‘Kant’s transcendental deduction
of aesthetical judgments’, Journal of
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Gibbons, S., Kant’s Theory of Imagination
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
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Ginsborg, H., The Role of Taste in Kant’s
Theory of Cognition (New York:
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–––––, ‘Reflective judgment and taste’, Noûs
24,1 (1990): 63–78.
–––––, ‘On the key to Kant’s critique of
taste’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
72,4 (1991): 290–313.
–––––, ‘Lawfulness without a law: Kant
on the free play of imagination and
understanding’, Philosophical Studies 25
(1997): 37–81.
–––––, ‘Kant on understanding organisms
as natural purposes’, in E. Watkins (ed.)
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–––––, ‘Aesthetic judging and the
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 Index
italics in entries indicate that these pages are devoted to analysis of the term or person in
question.
a priori/a posteriori  2, 12–13, 15–16, 18–
26, 33, 37–40, 45, 48, 50–1, 56, 64, 70,
72–3, 88–91, 95, 101, 114, 123, 127,
130–2, 137, 143, 147, 167, 173, 175–6,
183, 184, 187, 192–5, 203–4, 206–7,
211, 218, 220, 223, 226, 228–32,
236–41, 246–7, 250, 253, 257, 259–60,
263, 272–4, 280–6, 297–302, 311, 318,
321–7, 329–31, 342 see also synthetic
absolute  12–13, 38, 41, 43–5, 55, 91–2, 107,
109, 114–15, 135, 140, 144–5, 188,
192, 204, 209, 214, 220, 237–8, 241,
245, 248–50, 254, 256, 261–2, 270–3,
294, 305, 310–13, 317, 322–3, 345
abstraction  165, 219, 224, 253, 287, 304,
312–13
actuality  12, 75, 211, 237–8, 243–4,
248, 251, 256, 259, 269, 303–4
see also modality; necessity; possibility;
reality
aesthetic (transcendental)  2–4, 7, 15, 17,
20–4, 46, 49, 51–8, 94–6, 126–7, 137,
156, 165–8, 171, 173, 176–7, 184–6,
192, 195, 197, 201, 203, 204–6, 208,
212, 214, 216–17, 226, 231, 239,
243, 253–4, 259, 270, 271–2, 276,
280–2, 285, 294, 296, 316, 320, 326–7
see also transcendental
algebra  90, 135, 138, 227, 231
see also mathematics
421
amphiboly  94, 142, 160, 168–9, 197, 204,
210, 256, 259, 287
analogies of experience  see experience,
analogies of
analogy  26, 58, 60, 63–4, 74, 111, 169–70,
183, 214
analysis  13, 20, 35, 41, 66, 102, 135, 155,
159, 167, 172–3, 185, 191–2, 206, 210,
217–18, 224, 226, 230–1, 238, 240,
249, 261, 262, 265, 269, 272, 284, 288,
295–6, 321–2, 329, 331, 337
analytic  17, 19, 23, 25, 28, 30–1, 33, 35–7,
40, 46, 48–9, 51, 53, 55–7, 59–60,
72, 89, 91, 94, 130, 133, 149, 157,
166, 172–3, 177, 183, 185–7, 194,
196, 206, 210, 218, 220–1, 226, 230,
235, 245–6, 250, 269, 271–2, 276,
280, 283, 288, 300, 325, 329–33, 337
see also synthetic
anthropology  7, 35–6, 70, 96, 113, 121,
126, 134, 137, 148, 150, 155, 173–5,
201, 229, 271, 321
anticipations of perception  see perception
antinomy/antinomies  13, 18, 29–30, 34, 50,
58–9, 64–5, 72, 79, 95, 118, 125, 135,
177–80, 196, 209, 214, 228–9, 238,
247, 270, 274, 278, 285–6, 288, 316
Apel, Karl-Otto  337–40
appearance  14, 19, 22, 26–8, 30, 39, 43,
45, 48, 58, 101, 105, 132, 142, 157,
Index
168–9, 171–3, 176–9, 180–2, 186,
192, 195, 201, 204, 212–13, 215,
217, 221–2, 227, 238, 240, 242–3,
245, 247, 253, 256, 261, 274, 278–9,
282–6, 297, 301, 303–4, 312, 315–16
see also phenomena
apperception  24, 26, 123, 132, 173, 177,
180, 182–4, 189, 194, 208, 210–13,
217–18, 221, 239–42, 253–4, 273, 283,
287, 311, 326, 328 see also spontaneity
apprehension  27, 55, 171, 176, 184, 195,
226, 273 see also synthesis
architectonic  17, 32, 52–3, 71, 78, 101–2,
123, 143, 174, 214, 221, 257, 274–5, 327
Aristotle/Aristotelianism  23, 26, 32, 86–7,
90–1, 99–102, 110–12, 121–4, 125,
134, 141, 168, 204, 223–5, 275, 316
arithmetic  15, 90, 138, 186, 226–7, 229,
238 see also mathematics
art  3, 53, 56–7, 137, 165–7, 184–5, 214, 316–17
autonomy  39, 47, 49, 108, 124, 150, 167,
185, 188, 205–6, 233, 266, 290, 298,
335, 338 see also freedom; spontaneity
Bacon, Francis  19, 87, 99, 101, 124–6, 148
Bauch, Bruno  320
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb  12, 98,
100, 111–12, 126–7, 142, 157, 228–9,
251, 257, 265
beauty/beautiful  4, 51, 53–8, 148, 165–7,
173, 184–5, 204, 214, 239, 250, 254,
271, 316 see also aesthetic; sublime; taste
being  see ontology
belief  32, 91, 104, 107–8, 130, 138, 147,
152, 168, 201, 214, 238, 258, 263, 278,
298, 307
beneficence/benevolence  38, 79–80, 289, 333
Berkeley, George  17, 29, 32–3, 94–5, 259, 297–8
Campbell, John  331
categorical imperative  3, 36–9, 47, 69–70,
77, 114, 174, 187–9, 197–8, 212, 219,
227, 232–3, 235, 238–9, 254–5, 263,
266, 290, 333–7 see also morality
categories  2, 23–6, 28, 30, 34, 36–7, 40–1,
49, 53, 55, 64, 72, 86, 111, 121–3, 127,
131–2, 168, 170, 173, 175–7, 180–1,
422
183, 185, 189, 192–5, 206, 209, 217,
221, 223, 236–8, 243–4, 250, 256,
259, 269, 273, 281–3, 286, 288, 301–4,
311–13, 321, 325–7 see also deduction
cause/causality  2, 15, 20, 25–7, 30–1, 33,
37, 39, 44–6, 48–50, 54, 58–9, 72–3,
75, 94, 105, 108, 114–15, 122–3,
130, 132, 137–40, 140, 155–6, 168,
170–1, 178–9, 185, 189, 193, 201,
205, 218, 222, 229, 234–8, 240,
245–7, 250–1, 253–4, 261, 270,
276–7, 279, 286, 301–4, 314–17, 341
see also experience, analogies of, laws
certainty  40, 85, 104, 131–2, 184, 197, 221,
231, 234, 236, 240, 247, 253, 345
Christianity/Christian  61, 63, 65–6, 86,
104, 106–8, 111–12, 115, 122, 307,
309 see also religion
Cicero, Marcus Tullius 128–9 
coercion  71, 150, 198, 206, 233, 266, 309
cognition  14–16, 20, 22–4, 26, 28, 32–3, 40,
48, 50–2, 54, 56–7, 60, 90–1, 94, 101, 127,
129–31, 140–1, 143–4, 154, 166–8, 172–3,
176, 178, 184, 186, 191, 196, 202–4, 207,
209, 211, 215–17, 220–1, 223–5, 227–8,
229–31, 240–7, 253–4, 256–7, 259, 261,
265, 268, 270, 272–5, 278–81, 285, 287–8,
293–4, 297–301, 303–4, 314–15, 326, 330,
342 see also knowledge
Cohen, Hermann  320, 322, 324, 326
common sense  33, 36, 55–6, 166–7, 235,
239, 301
community  27, 62, 64–6, 73, 105–6, 150,
152, 170, 190, 193, 201, 219, 222, 262,
267, 340 see also religion
concepts  12, 16, 20–5, 28, 33–4, 40–1,
45–6, 48–9, 51–5, 57–9, 88–90, 101–2,
121–2, 126–7, 132–4, 137, 140–2,
144–5, 147, 154–6, 166–8, 170–3,
175–6, 179–81, 183, 185, 191, 192–4,
196, 200–4, 206–10, 212, 214–18,
220–9, 231–2, 236, 238–41, 243–54,
257, 261, 262–3, 265, 268–71, 272–5,
276–7, 280–3, 286, 288, 294, 298–304,
311–12, 314–15, 322, 325, 329, 331–2
see also categories; deduction; ideas;
schematism; understanding

conscience  79–80, 99, 107, 232, 288
consciousness  26, 29, 80, 95–6, 98, 101,
107, 113, 132, 156, 171–3, 176–7,
182–4, 186, 189, 194, 210, 212–13,
217, 221, 239, 240–2, 253, 256,
260, 265, 272, 287–8, 299–300, 302,
304, 309, 311–13, 321, 324, 331
see also apperception; representation
constitutive  31, 51, 58–60, 73, 103,
171, 178, 222–3, 261, 275, 327
see also regulative
construction  12, 18, 169, 186, 206–7,
221, 226–7, 231, 240, 300, 333
see also geometry; intuition; mathematics
contract  73–6, 93, 148–50, 338–9
contradiction  19, 33, 38, 42, 91, 129–30, 133,
137, 140, 156–7, 178, 188–9, 218, 220–1,
245–6, 248, 250, 272, 276, 286, 288,
300, 303–4, 333–4, 339–40 see also logic
Copernican  18–19, 191, 231, 285
cosmopolitan  68–9, 76, 78, 149–50, 190–1,
243, 267
Critique of Judgment  3–4, 22, 50–60,
115–16, 124, 127, 134, 137, 158, 165–7,
173, 184–5, 195, 200–1, 204–6, 212,
214, 216–17, 234, 239, 251, 253–4,
271–2, 275–7, 316, et passim
Critique of Practical Reason  45–50, 51,
60–1, 64, 72, 98, 112, 127, 134, 170,
173, 201, 204–6, 214, 219, 233–5,
238–9, 251, 254, 258, 270, 290, 335,
338, 341, et passim
Critique of Pure Reason  2, 11, 15, 16–32,
33–4, 36–7, 39–42, 44–56, 64, 88–9,
94–5, 102–4, 110, 123, 125–8, 131–3,
137, 141–3, 146, 155–7, 168, 179,
183–4, 185–6, 191–3, 208, 210–13,
215–18, 221, 226, 227–31, 235, 238–9,
242, 244–6, 248–50, 254, 257–9, 265,
268, 272–4, 296–300, 302–4, 306–7,
311–12, 324–9, 331, 351, et passim
Crusius, Christian August  100–1, 105,
111–12, 119, 129–30, 157, 228, 235
deduction  17–18, 23–6, 28, 41, 47–9, 56,
73, 95, 131–2, 166, 168, 170, 173, 177,
182–3, 186, 189, 192–5, 202, 208–9,
423
Index
216–17, 221, 223, 227, 236, 239, 244,
254, 269, 272–4, 276, 281–3, 287, 301,
311–13, 321, 326 see also transcendental
deontology  333–6 see also right
Descartes, René  2, 11–12, 20, 29, 41–2, 87,
95, 99, 105, 111, 121, 130–3, 137–9,
224, 235, 241, 244, 259, 285, 287, 330–2
desire  47, 51–2, 54, 62, 127, 130, 137,
148, 195, 214, 272, 290, 338–9
see also inclination; interest
dialectic  15–18, 23, 28, 31, 34, 36, 45–6,
49, 51, 57–9, 61, 92, 94–5, 107, 146,
148, 157, 167, 178, 195–7, 204, 208–9,
224, 228, 231, 242, 245, 247, 251, 254,
257, 261–2, 265, 274, 276, 278, 283–4
see also analytic
Diez, Carl  307, 310
difference  125, 139, 144, 168, 177, 197,
210, 224, 265, 281, 296, 299, 312–13
see also amphiboly; identity
discursive  194, 215–16, 246, 252, 268,
272–3, 277, 294, 326
dogmatism  16, 23, 29, 32–4, 89, 103, 112,
115, 121, 130, 139, 143, 151–2, 156–7,
192, 227, 229–32, 247, 258–9, 298–9,
304–5, 307, 309 see also empiricism;
rationalism
duty/duties  35, 37–8, 46–7, 49, 63, 70–1,
74, 77–81, 99, 129, 187–8, 197–8, 204,
212, 233–4, 263–4, 267, 288, 335, 337
dynamical/ dynamics  25, 30, 42–5, 55–6,
144, 171, 177–9, 236, 238, 272, 313,
316 see also force; matter; motion
Eberhard, Johann August  88–9, 157
empirical  20, 26–8, 31, 35, 47, 49, 52–3, 57,
65, 70–3, 75, 89, 98, 108, 114, 122–3,
125, 127, 133, 145, 147, 171–2, 174–7,
180–4, 186, 194–7, 202, 206–7, 211,
215, 217–18, 220–3, 229, 237, 239,
240–4, 250–4, 256–7, 259, 260–1, 265,
268, 273–4, 277, 285–8, 299, 301–5,
312, 314–15, 321–3, 330, 340, et passim
concepts  20, 40, 75, 217, 236, 239, 257,
268, 277, 314
consciousness  26, 176–7, 182–3, 186,
242, 256
Index
idealism  29, 33, 260, 287
intuition  181, 215, 217, 231, 270, 273,
302–5, 312
judgment  218, 220, 244, 252, 256
laws  14, 52–3, 59, 211, 217, 221–3, 274, 277
object  29, 194, 217, 252, 270, 283–4,
288, 303–4, 330
psychology  154, 157, 229, 252–3
realism  198, 257, 287
reality  22, 192, 256–7, 282, 284
self/subject  175, 252, 321–3
empiricism  90–1, 95, 100, 121, 134,
141–2, 148, 152, 154–5, 177, 191,
202–3, 221, 228–9, 322, 329–32
see also dogmatism; rationalism
enlightenment  1, 91–2, 96–7, 100–1,
103–4, 107, 118, 152–3, 156, 198–200,
212, 225, 232
Epicurus  32, 90, 133–4
epistemology/epistemic  88, 104, 131–3,
138–9, 141–2, 184, 207, 280, 282, 314,
319, 321–2 see also knowledge
essence  12, 40, 89, 122–3, 126, 133, 146,
259, 264, 305, 311, 326
ethics  2–3, 35, 49, 70–1, 78–9, 81, 86–7, 98,
104, 110–12, 124, 126, 128–9, 134, 148,
150, 156, 201, 229, 254, 317, 329, 332–42
see also categorical imperative; morality
Euler, Leonhard  101, 135–6, 202
Evans, Gareth  331
evil  48–9, 61–3, 65, 77, 138, 149, 168, 202,
234, 254–6, 262, 290
existence  11–13, 15–16, 19, 22, 25, 29–32,
38, 42–3, 46, 50, 59–60, 75, 90–1, 95,
101, 103–5, 126, 129–33, 137, 139,
141, 154, 170–2, 177–9, 181, 185,
189, 192, 208, 214–16, 222, 228, 235,
237–8, 241–5, 248–51, 256, 259–60,
269, 277, 279, 285–7, 295–6, 303, 308,
312, 323, 331 see also ontology
experience  14, 18–20, 22–8, 31–4, 36,
40–1, 45, 49, 52, 55, 61, 70, 72, 90–1,
102, 106–8, 123, 125, 132, 134–8,
141–2, 144–5, 152, 157, 167, 169,
170–2, 174–6, 178, 180–1, 183–4, 186,
190–5, 202–4, 205, 211, 214, 216, 218,
220–3, 228–32, 234–8, 243–7, 250–3,
424
256–7, 259, 263, 268–70, 274–8,
280–1, 284–7, 297–8, 301–4, 311–14,
316–18, 321, 325–8, 330–2
analogies of  25–7, 30, 44–5, 95, 105,
170–2, 173, 177–8, 189, 193, 203, 218,
222, 243–4, 247, 269, 272, 283, 286, 301
faith  60, 63–6, 80, 104, 106–8, 115, 204,
256, 258, 262–4, 278, 307–8, 320
see also religion
Feder, Georg Friedrich Heinrich  17, 32,
94–5, 128, 154, 297–8
feeling  49–57, 64, 79–80, 98–9, 108, 134,
138, 147, 149, 154, 166–7, 212, 214,
254, 271–2, 289–90, 309, 314, 316–17
see also aesthetic
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  271, 306–10, 314,
320, 326
Flatt, Johann Friedrich  307–8
force  20, 42–5, 58, 60, 98, 101, 105,
115, 144–5, 168, 235–7, 276
see also dynamics; matter; motion
form/formal  13–15, 20, 22–3, 25, 33, 39–40,
54, 56, 79, 95, 123, 142–4, 157, 168–9,
191–2, 195, 202–3, 204–5, 213, 222–5,
240, 254, 257, 261, 263, 265, 268–9,
272, 275, 282, 286, 288, 294, 302,
304–5, 313, 330 see also matter/material
formalism  303–5, 336, 342
Frederick the Great  91–3, 100, 109, 118,
142, 156
freedom  19, 30, 32, 39, 44, 46, 48–50,
52–3, 67, 70–2, 91–2, 113–15, 127,
130, 140, 151–2, 154, 170, 174, 179,
185, 192, 198–200, 205–6, 214, 219,
229–30, 233–5, 238, 258, 263, 266–7,
269–71, 285–6, 290, 317, 335–6
see also autonomy; spontaneity
French revolution 93–4 
Garve, Christian  17, 32, 94–5, 128–9,
154–5, 297–8, 301, 303
genius  see art
geometry  14–15, 21, 33, 58, 90, 101, 135,
138–9, 169, 186, 206–8, 215, 218,
226–7, 229, 238, 270, 275, 281–2, 330
see also construction; mathematics

God  2, 11–12, 19, 22, 31–2, 46–7, 49–50,
59–60, 63–6, 80–1, 90–1, 103–7,
114–16, 129–31, 133, 140–1, 151,
157, 170, 189, 192, 208–9, 214, 219,
228, 232, 241, 243, 248–51, 263–4,
285, 295, 308–9, 312, 325, 327–8, 330
see also faith; proof; religion
good/goodness  35–6, 39, 46, 48–50, 58,
61–6, 107, 124, 128, 134, 138, 187, 189,
197, 199, 201, 205, 208, 214, 232–5,
241, 251, 254–5, 258, 262–4, 277,
289–90, 333–6, 338 see also categorical
imperative; morality; religion; will
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of
Morals  3, 34–9, 46–7, 53, 61, et passim
Habermas, Jürgen 337–42  difference
Hamann, Johann Georg  92, 96, 147, 151,
155, 298–9
happiness  32, 37, 47, 49–50, 78–80,
104, 124, 134, 138, 149, 187, 204,
208, 214, 234, 251, 263–4, 289–90
see also feeling; morality; virtue
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  68, 157, 188–9,
271, 279, 305, 307–14, 319–21, 342
Heidegger, Martin  17, 29, 193, 211, 324–8
Herder, Johann Georg  85, 96–7, 115, 151,
155, 200, 316
Herz, Marcus  13, 16, 18–19, 25, 27, 113,
136–7, 155, 191, 227, 265, 295–6
humanity  38, 55, 60, 62–5, 71, 73, 79–80, 92–4,
114, 148–50, 167, 188, 219, 254, 334, 341
see also categorical imperative; morality
Hume, David  2, 16, 20, 25, 27, 32–4, 48,
60, 90–1, 98, 112–13, 130, 137–9, 155,
202, 239–40, 251, 257–9, 268, 272,
297–301, 303–5, 338
Husserl, Edmund  17, 324
Hutcheson, Francis  98–9, 112–13
hypothetical  19, 31, 36–8, 170, 187, 209,
217, 225, 230–1, 233, 245, 290, 300
see also categorical imperative
ideal  15, 30, 34, 54–5, 63, 65, 75, 81,
145–6, 150, 196, 199, 201, 209,
219–20, 248, 261, 274, 283–5, 339–40
see also transcendental
425
Index
idealism  1–2, 17, 29, 33, 94–5, 115–16, 125,
158, 275, 285–7, 297–8, 302, 304–7,
308–11, 318–19, 321, 330–2, et passim
refutation of  19, 22, 29, 95, 132, 158,
213, 244–5, 259–60
transcendental  29, 33, 95, 115–16,
179–80, 204–5, 230, 242, 257, 281,
285–7, 297, 300, 314–15, 329–32
ideas  13–14, 16, 28, 31, 34, 39, 45, 56–7,
90–1, 94, 121–3, 132, 137–8, 141–2,
146–7, 155, 185, 196, 204–5, 208–10,
214, 234, 240, 254, 265, 283, 285, 293,
298, 302, 307, 316–18
identity  29, 138, 140, 168, 182–3, 194,
210, 218, 242, 245–6, 252, 281,
312–13, 315, 341–2 see also amphiboly;
illusion  15, 22, 28, 178, 182, 196–7, 201,
204, 224, 241–2, 254, 261, 284, 297,
302–3, 319, 342–3 see also antinomies;
dialectic; paralogisms
image  95, 137, 167, 202, 206–7, 211,
268–9 see also schematism symbol
imagination  23–4, 27, 44, 53–5, 57, 138,
166–7, 185, 202–3, 211–12, 213,
215–16, 252, 260, 268–9, 272–4, 299,
305, 326–8 see also apperception;
deduction; synthesis
immortality  32, 46, 50, 103–4, 141, 152,
214, 234, 242, 252, 278, 285, 308
see also paralogisms psychology
Inaugural Dissertation  13–16, 20, 22, 136,
293–7 et passim
inclination  35–6, 38, 50, 62–3, 130, 150,
187–8, 197–8, 205, 212, 219, 233–4,
254, 289–90, 308–9 see also duty;
feeling; morality; virtue; will
inner/outer sense  22, 27, 102, 141, 155,
177, 183, 203, 212–13, 236, 242, 260,
269, 273, 281, 286, 296, 327–8
intelligible  14–16, 32, 39, 48–9, 62,
71–3, 157, 179, 278, 293–5, 315
see also Inaugural Dissertation; sensible
interest  53–4, 57, 166, 199, 201, 213–14,
233, 289, 338, 341 see also desire
intuition  13, 15, 19–23, 25, 28, 33, 40–2,
48–50, 55, 59, 72, 88–9, 91, 95, 123,
Index
135, 141–2, 146–7, 152–3, 166–7,
169, 173, 176, 179–82, 185–6, 191–5,
204–8, 210–13, 214–16, 220–2, 226–8,
231–2, 239, 241–2, 244, 247, 253, 260,
265, 268–70, 273–4, 280–2, 286, 288,
294, 298–300, 302–5, 311–14, 324–7,
329–30, 332
axioms of  25, 41, 171, 173, 185–7, 218,
222, 232, 243, 247, 269, 274–5, 282
see also empirical; sensibility
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich  97, 104, 115,
279, 302–5, 315
Judaism  65, 103–4, 109
judgment  4, 15, 19–24, 31, 33–5, 41–2,
51–60, 72, 76, 88–9, 91, 115–16, 123,
132, 142–3, 147, 165–7, 170, 172–3,
175, 180–1, 184–5, 187, 193–4, 202,
204, 209–12, 214, 216–18, 220–5,
227, 238–41, 249, 252, 256, 273, 277,
281–2, 287–8, 300–1, 332–3, et passim
aesthetic  3, 51–4, 56–8, 127, 137, 165–7,
173, 185, 195, 197, 204, 212, 214, 217,
239, 243, 254, 259, 271, 276, 316
of experience  33–4, 218
moral  113, 124, 333–4
of perception  33–4, 218
reflective  3–4, 53, 57–60, 116, 167, 217,
222–3, 259, 275
synthetic  19–23, 33, 35, 56, 72, 88–9,
91, 130, 147, 175, 187, 210, 218,
221, 224, 227, 238–40, 274, 281, 288,
300–1, 311
of taste  53–8, 127, 166–7, 184–5, 195,
205, 214, 218, 239, 254
teleological  51–2, 58–60, 115, 217, 277
knowledge  19–20, 23, 89–92, 101–3,
107, 112, 114–15, 121–7, 130–3,
135–44, 146–8, 150, 154, 157, 167,
169, 177, 181, 184, 188, 191–2,
194–6, 202, 206–7, 214–18, 220–1,
223, 226, 228–31, 238–40, 243–7,
257–9, 270, 272–80, 285–7, 297,
299, 301, 303, 310–16, 318–19,
321–3, 325–31
Knutzen, Martin  87, 100, 105, 108, 235
426
Königsberg  13, 61, 87, 96, 99–101, 102–3,
107–12, 136, 148, 151, 159, 228, 294,
306
Korsgaard, Christine  334, 336, 337–41
Lambert, Johann Heinrich  13, 42, 101–2,
155, 294–5
Lask, Emil  320
law/laws/lawfulness  3, 12–14, 19, 33–40,
44–53, 45–6, 59–65, 67–71, 73–4,
76–80, 93, 98–9, 101, 104, 109,
112–13, 115, 134–5, 144–5, 148–50,
152, 167–8, 171–2, 174, 180, 189, 195,
212, 219, 221, 222–3, 235–8, 239, 245,
256, 258, 266, 276, 288, 304, 341
empirical  14, 52–3, 211, 238, 274, 277
of freedom  70, 152, 229, 338
moral/ethical  39, 47–8, 64, 70, 78–9, 98,
187–9, 219, 238, 263, 338
of motion  12, 19, 59, 135, 144–5, 222,
237
of nature  12, 33, 59, 101, 134, 188,
221–3, 229, 305
system of  266
universal  12, 33–4, 37–9, 47, 71, 79, 187,
197, 204, 219, 233, 238, 258, 261, 266,
339–40
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm  15, 20, 22,
28, 60, 87–8, 100–2, 105, 109, 115,
121, 129, 136, 139–40, 141–2, 144–5,
154, 156, 168–9, 179, 183, 203,
207, 210, 224, 226, 228–9, 235, 250,
262, 268, 281–2, 287, 293, 299–300
see also amphiboly; metaphysics; Wolff,
Christian
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  85, 88, 103, 316
Liebman, Otto  320, 345
Locke, John  28, 42, 90–1, 100–2, 134,
141–2, 143, 154, 202, 225, 251–2,
281, 298, 301 see also amphiboly;
empiricism
logic  14, 23, 28, 41, 52–4, 87, 89, 102, 131,
142–3, 156, 168–9, 191, 193–4, 196,
204, 218, 223–5, 229, 244–5, 248–9, 265,
268, 270, 275, 280–1, 288, 318, 321–3,
329–31 see also abstraction; concepts
lying  47, 49, 80, 289

magnitude  15, 20–1, 55, 171, 176–7, 186,
226–7, 231, 282 see also perception,
anticipations of
Maimon, Salomon  16, 104, 137, 298–302,
304–5
manifold  12, 23–4, 27, 34, 54, 123, 166–7,
170–2, 179, 182–3, 194–5, 203, 206,
210, 213, 215–16, 221–2, 226, 239,
256, 265, 270–4, 280, 282, 303, 309,
312 see also synthesis
mathematics  15, 18–19, 25, 33–4, 40,
71, 86, 102, 131, 135, 173, 184,
186, 191, 207, 218, 226–7, 228–9,
231–2, 238, 247, 294, 300–1, 329–30
see also arithmetic; geometry
matter/material  12–14, 38–45, 47, 49,
59–60, 72, 79, 105, 130, 134–6, 138–9,
144–5, 168–9, 176–7, 185, 191, 202–4,
213, 221–2, 225, 235–8, 240, 242,
244–5, 253, 256, 268, 276–7, 286, 297,
302, 304–5 see also amphiboly; form/
formal
maxims  35, 37–9, 46–7, 50, 59, 61–3, 68–
70, 78–9, 91, 174, 187–9, 196, 200–1,
204, 219, 227, 255, 258, 266, 333–4,
339 see also categorical imperative
McDowell, John  332
mechanics, mechanical  44–5, 59–60, 123,
134–5, 144–5, 222, 236–7, 252, 270,
275–7 see also teleology/teleological
Meier, Georg Friedrich  142–4, 224, 251,
265
Mendelssohn, Moses  11, 13, 44, 85–6, 92,
102–4, 136–7, 147, 151, 153–5, 241,
294–5
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science  40–5, 51, 172, 235–7, et passim
metaphysics  2–3, 14–16, 18–20, 32–6,
38–41, 43, 70, 87–9, 102–5, 110–12,
114–15, 121, 126, 130–1, 135, 137,
148, 151–3, 156–7, 168, 172–3, 191–2,
196–7, 221, 227–30, 236, 238–9, 241,
246, 252, 254, 257, 275, 278, 285,
294, 297, 311, 314, 318, 321, 323–32
see also epistemology; ontology;
philosophy
Metaphysics of Morals  3, 70–81, et passim
427
Index
method/methodology  4, 15, 17–19, 31–3,
35–7, 41, 46, 48, 50–1, 58, 60, 66–7,
70, 78, 86, 101–2, 104, 111, 122,
124–5, 129–32, 142, 149–50, 155–7,
172–3, 191–2, 209, 228, 230–2, 253,
262, 275, 278, 316, 319, 321–3, 329
mind  13–14, 29, 39–40, 50, 52, 55–7,
79, 90, 101–2, 105, 108, 121, 125,
132, 137–8, 140–2, 144, 166, 182,
201, 211–14, 240, 252, 259–60,
265, 270, 272, 277, 293–5, 303
see also apperception; knowledge;
paralogisms; psychology; receptivity;
spontaneity; inner/outer sense
modality/modal  25, 28, 30, 36–7, 45,
55, 64, 184, 217, 222, 236–8, 243,
256, 259 see also actuality; necessity;
possibility
monads/monadology  43, 135, 139–40, 169,
183, 228, 235, 281, 287
moral/morality  32, 35–9, 46–50, 53, 55,
57–8, 60–6, 68–70, 74, 78–81, 85, 91,
93–4, 98–9, 107–8, 112–13, 115–16,
121, 123–4, 127–9, 134, 138–9, 143,
148–53, 166, 174–5, 187–9, 192, 195,
197–8, 201, 204–5, 208, 214, 219–20,
228–9, 232–5, 238–9, 251, 254–5,
258, 262–4, 266–7, 271–2, 277, 285,
289–90, 308–9, 316–17, 323, 332–42
see also ethics
motion  12, 19, 21, 41–2, 44–5, 59, 135,
144–5, 222, 236–7 see also dynamics;
force; matter
mysticism/mystic  106, 108, 147, 151–3
Natorp, Paul  320, 322
natural science  235–7 see also science
nature  12–13, 16, 30, 32–3, 37, 39–41,
43–4, 49, 51–3, 56–60, 62, 94, 101, 108,
114–15, 123–5, 129, 134, 138, 144–5,
150, 165, 167, 170–2, 179, 185, 188,
195, 210, 214, 217, 221–3, 229, 235–8,
245, 251, 254, 270, 272, 275–7, 304–5
human  62, 70, 94, 148–9, 201, 234,
254–5, 262, 316
state of  64, 67–8, 76, 78, 149, 266–7
see also empirical
Index
necessity  36–7, 56, 59, 130, 143, 152, 155,
166, 169, 184, 192, 196, 221, 227,
237, 238–9, 240, 243–5, 248–9, 253,
259, 261, 266, 269, 281, 308, 311, 330
see also actuality; modality; possibility
neo-Kantianism  17, 318–26
Newton, Isaac  19, 22, 43, 45, 135, 140,
144–5, 148, 172, 222, 228–9, 235, 237,
275, 282
noumenal/noumenon/a  14, 28, 60, 75,
77, 79, 144, 168–9, 175, 192, 210,
239, 256, 279, 285–7, 294, 302
see also idealism, transcendental
number  135, 226–7, 287
see also arithmetic; mathematics
object(s)  14–16, 18–20, 22, 25–7, 29, 40,
45–9, 52–6, 58–60, 71–2, 75, 108, 113,
123, 126, 131–3, 135, 138, 141–2,
145–6, 165–71, 175–86, 191–5, 202–7,
209–18, 220–4, 226–31, 234, 236–8,
239–41, 242–7, 252, 254, 256–7,
259–61, 263, 265, 267–72, 274–5,
277–88, 293, 295–301, 303–4, 311–12,
321–2, 325–8, 330–2
of aesthetic judgment  55, 166
as appearance  180–1, 192, 274
of cognition  60, 191, 285, 287
empirical  29, 194, 217, 252, 270, 283–4,
288, 303–4
of experience  40, 45, 72, 145, 175,
180–1, 183, 192, 195, 202, 208, 230,
234, 237, 247, 256, 285, 301, 311,
325–8, 330
external  29, 71–2, 132, 244, 259, 265
of intuition  216–17
of knowledge  169, 191, 244, 275, 318,
326–8
of perception  145, 171, 176, 180, 195
of practical reason  48
of representation  27, 295
of thought  41, 209, 299
objective/objectivity  15, 17, 24, 27, 38, 46,
48, 56, 58, 98, 122, 124, 128, 130,
132, 143, 154–5, 166, 170–2, 176,
181–3, 191–6, 202, 209, 215–22, 238,
239–40, 244–7, 256–7, 261–2, 269–70,
428
273, 275, 283–4, 294–6, 299, 301–3,
308, 311–13, 318, 322–3, 326–7, 331
see also reality
obligation  71, 74, 79–80, 98–9, 112, 188,
264, 337–8, 340–1
Only Possible Argument in Support of the
Existence of God  11–13, 14–15, 31,
248–50, et passim
ontology  89, 101, 112, 155, 157, 228–9,
241, 246, 257, 318, 321, 325–6
see also metaphysics
organic/organism  60, 115, 124, 199, 274,
276–7 see also teleology/teleological
paralogisms  17, 28–30, 34, 95, 105,
132, 182, 192, 209, 214, 228,
241–3, 247, 252, 258, 270, 272, 285
see also psychology
peace  66–70, 78, 94, 150, 190, 243, 267
see also cosmopolitan
perception(s)  25, 27, 33–4, 90, 95, 123,
132, 137–40, 145, 156–7, 170–2,
176–7, 180, 183, 194–5, 202–3, 207,
213, 216, 218, 220, 240, 243–5, 256,
260, 265, 301–2, 316, 323, 331
anticipations of  25, 175–7, 178, 186,
218, 222, 247, 256, 269, 274
perfection  63, 78–80, 124, 146, 157
phenomenology  45, 101, 145, 236–7, 324
phenomenon/a  12, 14, 28, 79, 123–4,
135, 153, 176, 181, 192, 256, 277,
285–6, 294, 303, 315, 321, 328
see also appearances
philosophy, passim 
critical  4, 16, 19, 26, 56, 88–9, 95, 105,
112, 121, 135, 151–3, 155–7, 173, 180,
204, 254, 261, 272, 297–9, 303–8,
310–12, 314, 320–1, 329, 332, 345
of culture  319–23
of nature  134, 238
political  103, 148, 150, 337
practical  2–3, 32, 34, 36, 52–3, 70, 112,
134, 173, 180, 204, 208, 214, 239, 254,
263, 277, 337–9
of religion  88, 264
school 110–12 
theoretical  2–3, 97, 221, 322–3

transcendental  20, 122–3, 126–7, 173,
227, 231, 262, 265, 274–5, 299, 302,
305, 309, 313, 318, 321–2, 328
of values  323
phoronomy  41–2, 45, 236
physics  20, 50, 71, 80, 87, 101, 135, 144,
228–9, 235, 237, 324, 332
Pietism/pietist  100, 106–8, 112, 126, 142,
156, 201–2, 235
Plato  32, 94–5, 121–3, 128, 145–7, 199,
287, 314, 318, 342
pleasure  47–8, 51–7, 74, 81, 134, 166–7,
197, 214, 233–4, 243 see also aesthetic;
happiness
possibility  12–13, 18, 20, 28, 30–1, 33–4,
39, 43, 46, 48, 50, 58, 71, 73, 89, 91,
102, 108, 112, 131, 143, 147, 169, 171,
173, 175, 178, 183, 186, 193–4, 202–3,
207, 210–11, 216–17, 221, 223, 229–31,
237–8, 243–4, 246–50, 254, 259, 261,
263, 270, 272–4, 279, 281, 283–4,
286–8, 297–302, 309, 315, 321, 325, 330
see also actuality; modality; necessity
postulates of empirical thought  25, 27, 29,
95, 203, 222, 228, 243–5, 259, 274
see also experience; modality
principle of contradiction  see contradiction
Prize Essay  85–6
Prolegomena to Any Future
Metaphysics  32–4, et passim
proof(s)  32, 85, 135, 176–7, 179–80, 194,
208, 231–2, 247–8, 259–60, 275, 309,
338, 341
of the existence of God  12–13, 30–1, 60,
129, 131, 133, 170, 189, 192, 214, 228,
241, 243, 248–51, 278, 308, 312
psychology  see empirical; transcendental
publicity/public  68–9, 71, 75–8, 92, 190,
199–200, 258, 266–7, 337, 341
purposive/ness  31, 53–4, 56, 58–9, 115–16,
124, 166–7, 170, 185, 217, 223, 250–1,
254, 271–2, 276–7 see also teleology
Putnam, Hilary  329, 332
quality  25, 29–30, 41–2, 53, 64, 77, 125,
138, 176–7, 222, 231, 236, 244, 256
see also anticipations of perception
429
Index
quantity  15, 25, 29–30, 41–4, 54–5, 64, 77,
144–5, 177, 206, 222, 227, 231, 236–7,
244, 271, 282 see also matter
Quine, W. V. O  329–31
radical evil 254–5  see also evil
Rapp, Gottlob Christian  307–9
rationalists/rationalism  16, 96, 103, 107,
111–12, 115, 122, 135, 141, 154–6,
177, 191, 196–7, 221, 246, 252, 254,
257–9, 299, 326
Rawls, John  3, 77, 332, 336–9, 342
reality  22, 46, 56, 94, 101–2, 122–4, 135,
139, 157, 168, 176, 178, 191–2, 198,
220, 230, 249–50, 256–7, 279, 282–4,
286, 295–6, 303, 309, 319, 322, 323
see also empirical; objective
reason(s)  257–9, et passim
fact of  47, 91, 235, 335, 338, 341
for action  198, 205, 234, 336
practical  19, 36, 39, 45–50, 61, 69, 72–3,
79, 95, 98, 152, 173, 195, 228, 254,
258, 267, 312, 323, 336
pure  16, 18, 28, 30–4, 39, 45, 48, 50, 61,
89, 94, 125–6, 146, 156–7, 196, 208–9,
221, 229, 231–2, 241, 247–8, 254,
257–8, 298, 308
sufficient  104, 140, 156, 179, 246–7,
303, 314
theoretical  48, 50, 148, 152, 173, 214, 254
receptivity  14, 21, 211, 216, 260, 270–1
see also spontaneity
regulative (principles)  16, 31, 34, 37, 45,
58–9, 146, 171, 178, 196, 204, 208,
214, 222–3, 237, 243, 251, 261–2, 275,
283, 286, 288, 312 see also constitutive
Reinhold, Karl Leonhard  16, 88, 92, 95, 97,
130, 282, 298–300, 303, 305–10
religion  3, 34, 61–6, 68, 76, 88, 91, 107–9,
114, 199, 201–2, 204, 208, 234, 251,
256, 262–4, 307–8
Religion within the Boundaries of Mere
Reason Alone  3, 60–6, et passim
representation(s)  14, 16, 20–5, 27, 48, 63,
66, 94–5, 101, 106, 123, 127, 132, 145,
154, 166, 168–72, 176, 179, 181–3,
185–6, 189, 191, 194–5, 194–5, 201–3,
Index
210–13, 215–18, 224, 226–7, 231, 237,
239–42, 247, 252–3, 257, 260, 265,
268–74, 280–2, 284–6, 293–9, 303–4,
312, 314–15, 326–30, 332 see also mind
republic/republican  67–8, 190, 267
respect  36, 49, 55, 62, 72, 79–80, 98–9,
150, 174, 187, 191, 214, 266, 272,
309, 316, 329 see also categorical
imperative; morality
Rickert, Heinrich  320, 322
right(s)  46, 67–79, 91, 93, 138, 148, 150,
189–91, 199, 201, 206, 230, 233, 258,
263, 266–7
cosmopolitan  68–9, 76, 78, 190–1, 267
domestic  73–5
international  78, 190, 206, 267
private  71, 73, 75–6, 266–7
property  73, 233
public  69, 71, 76, 78, 190, 266–7, 337
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  147–50, 151, 153, 229
scepticism/sceptical  2, 29, 32, 34, 90, 121,
131, 152, 192, 214, 229, 244, 258–60,
285, 298–300, 303–5, 332, 338–9
see also dogmatism
Schelling, F. W. J.  116, 279, 304–6, 308,
310, 314, 326
schema/schematism  25–8, 32, 37–41, 49,
63, 95, 170, 186, 206–7, 212, 217,
226–7, 256, 268–9, 280, 327
Schiller, Friedrich  97, 137
Schultz, Franz Albert  100, 108
Schultz, Johann  294–5, 306–7
Schulze, Gottlob Ernst  302–4, 314–15
science(s)  14–15, 18–20, 32–4, 40–1, 57–8,
70, 99, 101, 107, 115, 124, 126, 135,
145–6, 148–9, 157, 172, 191, 209, 218,
222–3, 226–31, 235–7, 246, 253, 269,
276, 281, 299–300, 305, 311, 318–19,
321, 329, 331–2 see also knowledge;
mathematics; philosophy
Sellars, Wilfrid  1, 4, 329, 332
sensation  14, 20, 42, 52, 54, 57, 94, 101,
138, 140, 144, 154, 176–7, 182, 201,
203, 212, 215–16, 244, 253, 256, 265,
269, 271, 280–2, 284, 297, 299, 303–4,
316 see also intuition; perception
430
sensibility  14, 20–3, 25, 33, 39, 99, 123,
127, 140, 142, 144, 166, 168, 192, 195,
201–3, 207–8, 211–12, 215, 220, 253,
260, 269, 271–3, 279–80, 282, 286,
298–9, 303, 308–9 see also experience;
inner/outer sense
Smith, Adam  75, 112–14
sovereign/sovereignty  39, 76–7, 93, 107,
219–20, 341
space  12, 15, 19–22, 25, 27, 29–30, 33,
41–6, 49, 134–6, 140–1, 144–6, 153,
155, 168–9, 172, 176–9, 182, 192, 195,
203–4, 206–7, 210, 212, 215, 226, 229,
231, 236–7, 242, 244, 253, 257, 260,
268, 270, 278, 280–2, 285–7, 293–7,
299, 302, 305, 314–17, 326, 328,
330–1 see also transcendental aesthetic
absolute  41, 45, 135, 140, 144–5
empty  43–4, 134, 145–6, 176, 236–7
Spinoza, Benedict de  59, 97, 114–16, 121, 139
spontaneity  24, 39, 127, 140, 154, 183,
188, 205, 211, 213, 252, 260, 270–1,
273, 280 see also apperception
state(s)  67–9, 71, 76–8, 93, 107, 109,
156, 190, 206, 233, 266–7, 339
see also nature and right
Stoics/Stoicism  50, 63, 112, 122, 128
Storr, G. C.  308–10
Strawson, Peter  26–7, 329, 331–2
subject/subjective  15, 24, 27, 38, 46, 54,
56, 60, 62, 67, 76, 79–80, 106, 124,
130–2, 134, 144, 166–7, 170–3, 176,
181–2, 194, 196, 209–10, 213, 217–18,
220, 225, 230, 239–44, 249–53, 261,
270–2, 275, 282, 285–7, 288, 293–6,
299, 301–2, 305, 308, 310–13, 315–16,
321–3, 340–1, et passim
sublime  3, 51, 53, 55–6, 153, 166, 173,
197, 201, 214, 250, 271–2, 316
substance(s)  13, 15, 26–9, 27, 43–4, 72, 87,
105–6, 114–15, 121–3, 130, 137, 139–40,
142, 144, 169–72, 193, 210, 212, 222,
227, 235, 240–2, 251, 269, 272, 294–5,
327 see also metaphysics; ontology;
apperception, analogies of experience
succession  27, 101, 138, 141, 172, 222,
240, 246, 293–5, 301

Süßkind, Friedrich Gottlieb  309
Sulzer, Johann Georg  13, 101, 154, 294
Swedenborg, Emanuel  96, 151–4, 229
syllogism  28, 30, 77, 101, 209, 221, 223,
225, 242, 252 see also logic
symbol/symbolic  14, 58, 63, 101, 153, 156,
170, 207, 227, 316, 319
synthesis/synthetic (a priori)  2, 13, 19–25,
27, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 48, 56, 72, 88–9,
91, 95, 102, 123, 130–2, 147, 149, 173,
175–6, 178–81, 183–4, 186–7, 189,
193–5, 202–4, 206, 209–11, 213, 215–18,
220–1, 223–7, 230–2, 239–43, 247, 254,
256–7, 268–71, 272–4, 281–2, 286, 288,
297, 300–4, 311, 313, 325–6, 328–31
system(s)/systematicity  19, 31–2, 35, 38,
51–2, 58–61, 76, 86, 99, 105, 113, 115,
123, 125, 128–9, 131, 134–6, 140,
142–3, 153, 156–7, 168–70, 196, 198,
204, 208–9, 214, 217–19, 221–3, 229,
233–4, 237–8, 247–8, 261–2, 266,
274–6, 277–9, 288, 303–4, 307, 310,
313, 321–3, 337, 340 see also philosophy
taste  52–8, 113, 127, 138, 166–7, 184–5,
195, 204–5, 214, 218, 239, 254, 276,
316 see also beauty
teleology/teleological  3–4, 51–3, 58–60,
114–15, 123–4, 134, 167, 170,
173, 185, 198, 217, 223, 251, 254,
275, 276–8, 314, 334, 338, 341
see also purposiveness
Tetens, Johann Nicolaus  139, 141, 154–5, 252
theology/theological  12, 30–1, 36, 60–1,
85–6, 88, 99–100, 104, 106–7, 110–12,
125–6, 151, 157, 209, 214, 228,
248–51, 283, 294, 308–9 see also God;
proof; religion
time  15, 17, 19–22, 24–7, 30, 33, 42,
46, 49, 75, 78, 123, 135–6, 141–2,
153, 170–2, 176–9, 182, 192, 195,
203–4, 212–13, 215, 222, 226, 229,
231, 242, 244, 246–7, 252–3, 257,
260, 269, 280–2, 285–6, 293–7, 299,
302, 305, 314–15, 317, 326–8, 330–1
see also transcendental aesthetic;
schematism
431
Index
totality  13, 40, 49, 59, 63, 76, 108, 177–9,
182, 209, 225, 249, 272, 274, 286, 319
Toward Perpetual Peace  66–70, et passim
transcendental 280, et passim 
aesthetic  15, 17, 20–4, 94–5, 127, 156,
168, 171, 173, 176–7, 182, 186, 192,
195, 203, 206, 208, 212, 215, 226, 231,
244, 253, 278, 280–2, 285–6, 296, 326–7
analytic  17, 23, 28, 30–1, 33, 94, 157,
177, 235, 246, 280–1, 288, 325
arguments  232, 302, 329–31, 341
deduction  17–18, 24–6, 28, 41, 73, 131,
192–5, 216–17, 239, 269, 282, 301,
311, 321, 326
dialectic  15, 17–18, 23, 28, 34, 45, 146,
157, 195–6, 231, 257, 265, 276, 283
see also dialectic
ideal  30, 34, 196, 209, 247–8, 262, 274,
283–5 see also ideal
idealism  2, 21, 29, 33, 95, 105, 115–16, 125,
135, 179–80, 192, 204–5, 208, 221, 228,
230, 239–40, 242, 257, 259, 278, 281,
285–7, 297, 300, 314–15, 329–32, 342
ideas  34, 39, 196, 208–9
logic  17, 23, 28, 196, 223, 280, 288, 318,
321, 327
philosophy  20, 122–3, 126–7, 173, 227,
231, 262, 265, 274–5, 299, 302, 305,
309, 313, 318, 321–2, 328
psychology  24, 252–3
realist/realism  29, 105, 141, 179, 257, 259
reflection  136, 168–9, 204, 210, 340
truth(s)  31, 50, 76, 85, 91, 94, 101–2, 104,
124–5, 129–30, 138, 140, 143, 146–7,
150, 154, 194, 199, 223, 226, 238,
245–7, 253, 257, 278, 287–8, 297,
299–300, 302–3, 323, 330, 340
understanding  13–15, 18, 20, 23, 28, 48–9,
51–5, 57–60, 90, 94–5, 116, 123, 127,
129–30, 140–2, 146, 155–6, 166–71,
173, 176, 178, 180–1, 191–3, 195–6,
199, 202–4, 208–13, 216–18, 220–5,
229–31, 236–8, 243–7, 253–4, 256, 261,
268–71, 273–5, 279–81, 283–4, 288, 294,
298–300, 302, 304–5, 311–14, 326–8,
334 see also judgment; reason; sensibility
Index
universal/universality/universalization  3,
12, 14–15, 19, 21–3, 28, 33–4, 36–9,
41, 47–8, 52–4, 56, 64, 68, 70–1, 78–9,
98, 101–2, 105–6, 122, 127, 134,
136, 143–4, 154, 166–7, 169, 183–4,
187–91, 197, 199, 200, 204, 206,
214–15, 217, 219, 221–2, 227, 229,
232–3, 237–9, 244, 255, 258, 261–3,
265–7, 276–7, 280, 284, 299, 311, 323,
331, 333–4, 338–41 see also laws
validity  48, 53, 56, 58, 72, 155, 170, 179,
182, 194, 206, 218, 226, 246–7, 264,
273, 275, 300, 302, 308, 312–13, 318,
320–3, 340
432
virtue(s)  63–4, 66, 78–81, 86, 99, 124, 128,
134, 198, 201, 234, 262, 288, 289, 309,
332, 337
will/willing  2–3, 35–9, 46–50, 54, 67–8,
72–3, 75–6, 78–9, 98, 101, 108, 112,
114, 127, 134, 137–8, 150, 170, 179,
187–9, 204–6, 208, 212, 214, 219,
232–3, 235, 254, 258, 270, 279, 285–6,
290, 308, 314–17, 333–9, 341
Windelband, Wilhelm  320
Wolff, Christian/wolffians  12, 22, 32, 86–8,
99–101, 107–9, 111–12, 114, 126, 129,
135–6, 142, 144–5, 154, 156–7, 224,
228–9, 235, 241, 246, 251–2, 254, 265